When I first registered this blog I wasn’t really sure what I wanted it to be. I didn’t want it to be a one-trick pony that was tied down to one subject or even one tone of writing.
The simple fact is that some days I want to talk about ridiculous things on TV that have annoyed me, some days I want to laugh at the silly things people have said or done, and sometimes there will be serious things to talk about.
In an ideal world, those serious things would be few and far between, so it’s with a heavy heart that my first post falls into this category.
Some of you may have heard of Stanislaw Burzynski, but a few of you might have. He runs the Burzynski Clinic, an alternative cancer treatment centre in Houston, Texas.
I had certainly never heard of him until today, when I was looking through my Twitter stream and saw that his organisation had decided to sue Rhys Morgan, a 17 year old college student.
Why would he do this? A fine question to ask. The reason is that Rhys had himself posted a blog (found here) questioning the efficacy of Burzynski’s treatments.
Rhys has since posted a follow up blog (here) detailing the thinly veiled threats and promises of legal action that he received from one Marc Stephens acting on their behalf.
In reading the account of these events on Rhys’ blog I found out about the remarkably similar position that Andy Lewis found himself in after posting an article on his Quackometer blog (here).
Again Marc Stephens is involved and the emails sent include what could be interpreted again as thinly veiled threats, this time mentioning his family and newborn child.
Of course, Andy has also posted a follow up article including details of these communications (here).
Now, I’m not going to write another blog questioning the validity of Burzynski’s claims for a cure for cancer (the blogs by Rhys and Andy do that more than adequately), I’m genuinely interested in the mindset of people who make these claims of revolutionary treatments and cures.
There are two main conclusions that are drawn in the majority of cases: either the person is an out and out fraud, praying on the vulnerable, weak and desperate in order to fill their own wallets, or they genuinely believe that their treatment works, and flat out refuse to accept anything alternative to this reality they have created.
I can’t decide which of these two alternatives is more worrying (and dangerous).
In the Burzynski case, families are being asked to pay huge sums of money in order to be accepted onto one of their medical trials (they are trials because the FDA has not approved the treatment), and travel to Houston for a treatment from which, according to the Cancer Research UK website, there is no evidence of any benefit to cancer sufferers.
If the first of the two options is the correct one (in any instance) then it is surely our duty as fellow humans to draw attention to the exploitation of desperate families by frauds obsessed with increasing only their bank balances, and not the life expectancy of their patients.
In my opinion these types of organisation, operating under the false pretence of providing a “miracle cure” should all be subject to scientific scrutiny. This should be the case for any medicine/drug/treatment that is intended to be available to us in any capacity.
And I strongly feel that any organisation avoiding these basic responsibilities should be subject to legal action. In a great many cases there are people’s lives at stake.
The second of our two options is always the more bizarre in my mind. A ‘lone genius’, discovering a fantastic new treatment. This always rings alarm bells, as many others have pointed out, because very rarely are scientific breakthroughs the work of one person.
New treatments are developed and refined through collaboration, scrutiny, and most importantly, critical appraisal.
If a single person discovered this treatment, and their work has not been peer-reviewed in a major scientific journal (in some cases no journals at all), how can we be confident that it is factually correct? This is why any and all trial data must be made available so that claims can be confirmed or refuted. This is the essence of scientific discovery, and any true scientist will tell you that it is welcomed with open arms. Only those with something to hide have any reason to shy away from it.
There are also the conspiracy theorists out there who claim that “Big Pharma” is suppressing the result of their work as it would put them out of business.
This is all well and good, but you cannot silence scientists the world over. Big Pharma cannot have every scientist and journal in its pocket. If the work was important in any way, it would be published in some form. This argument simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny at all.
The bottom line is that whether they do so maliciously or innocently, these purveyors of unproven ‘alternative’ treatments are creating a false hope in so many families while picking their pockets.
And in these cases where bank accounts are being drained, robbing the families of other options to make the time they have more comfortable, false hope is as good as no hope at all.
This isn’t a question of morality; it’s a question of humanity. And these exploiters just aren’t human in my eyes.
