Tag: Texas Medical Board

Is the ACCME cracking down on quackery in continuing medical education (CME) offerings? Richard Jaffe thinks so.

Richard Jaffe, a lawyer who has made a career out of defending quacks like Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, thinks that the ACCME, the main accrediting body for continuing medical education (CME) credits, is cracking down on "complementary and alternative medicine" CME courses. That would be a very good thing indeed, but is it really happening? More importantly, would it be enough?

/ March 20, 2017

The Texas Medical Board lets Stanislaw Burzynski off lightly: A cautionary tale of the failure of regulating medicine

After three years and countless twists and turns, the final decision by the Texas Medical Board on the sanctions to be imposed on Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski were announced on Friday. Sadly, they were not enough. The Burzynski saga should serve as a cautionary tale that the regulation of physicians and medicine is too lax, not too strict.

/ March 6, 2017

Stanislaw Burzynski and Robert O. Young: How two quacks of a feather illustrate how poorly states regulate medical practice

One of the weaknesses in our system of regulating the practice of medicine in the United States is that, unlike most countries, we don’t have one system. We have 50 systems. That’s because the functions of licensing physicians and regulating the practice of medicine are not federal functions, but state functions. Each state sets its own laws and regulations governing the practice...

/ November 23, 2015

The Texas Medical Board vs. Stanislaw Burzynski, 2014 edition

Here we go again. I'll give the Texas Medical Board credit for one thing. It's persistent. It's going after Stanislaw Burzynski's medical license again. Will this finally be the time the TMB puts a stop to Burzynski's abuse of the clinical trial process and patients? Or will this be a replay of the 1990s, with Burzynski slithering away yet again?

/ July 14, 2014

Now that Burzynski has gotten off in 2012, Burzynski The Movie will spawn a sequel in 2013

About a year ago, I became interested in a physician named Stanislaw Burzynski who has been treating cancer with compounds that he calls “antineoplastons” for over three decades without, in my opinion, ever having ever produced any compelling evidence that antineoplastons have significant anticancer activity. Although I had been vaguely aware of Burzynski and his activities, it was the first time that...

/ December 3, 2012

The Texas Medical Board acts in the case of the Winkler County whistle blowing nurses

I can’t speak for anyone else who blogs here at Science-Based Medicine, but there’s one thing I like to emphasize to people who complain that we exist only to “bash ‘alternative’ medicine.” We don’t. We exist to champion medicine based on science against all manner of dubious practices. Part of that mandate involves understanding and accepting that science-based medicine is not perfect....

/ July 19, 2010

The Winkler County nurse case and the problem of physician accountability

A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE THAT HAD A (SORT OF) HAPPY ENDING Back in September and then again last week, I wrote briefly (for me) about an incident that I considered to be a true miscarriage of justice, namely the prosecution of two nurses for having reported the dubious and substandard medical practices of a physician on the staff of Winkler County Hospital...

/ February 15, 2010

The legal establishment of Winkler County, Texas conspires to punish whistle blowing nurses

On Science-Based Medicine, several of us have at various times criticized state medical boards for their tolerance of unscientific medical practices and even outright quackery. After all, Dr. Rashid Buttar still practices in North Carolina and the medical board there seems powerless to do anything about it. However, state medical boards have other functions, one of which is to respond to complaints...

/ February 8, 2010