Comment and Opinion
Burzynski Research Institute
Someone wrote to me recently and, as part of convincing me that I am "full of shit", he mentioned the "72 FDA-approved clinical trials" being conducted by the Burzynski Research Institute into treatment for terminal cancer. The Institute seems to be investigating the same treatment in all 72 trials based on a theory that all cancers are the same thing and all can be treated by the same medications.
The Burzynski trials are often offered by supporters of "alternative medicine" as examples of the imminent acceptance of the theories underlying the trials. That is, the fact that trials are being done is offered as some form of proof that the medical establishment accepts the principles on which the trials are based. This is nonsense. The FDA really doesn't care about clinical trials as long as certain ethical and legal requirements are met - you can't purposely harm people and there has to be a degree of informed consent. Those hated pharmaceutical companies are conducting thousands of clinical trials at any one time, but the proponents of quackery rarely suggest that this confirms the validity of science-based medicine.
A brief examination of the 72 trials suggests that there is really one trial, repeated 71 times for different cancer locations. (I did not say "types of cancer" because it seems to me that Dr Burzynski believes that there is only one form of cancer but it shows up in different places.) The method of creating a new trial is to pull the documentation for one into a word processor and change every occurrence of, e.g., "breast" to "adenoid" or "epiglottis".
I looked at one of these trials in conjunction with somebody who is a specialist in the area. The particular trial was "Patients With Carcinoma Of The Uterine Cervix And/Or Vulva" (see Note 2 below), and the person I spoke to was someone who has been working in the area of the detection of cancer of the cervix for the past 20 years (and had, in that time, never come across the word "antineoplaston"). He is an international speaker on the subject and is in the process of producing a book to be used in the training of laboratory technicians examining pap smears. Some things we observed in this particular trial were:
- Subjects had to be dying of cancer and have abandoned conventional treatment. People that were too sick, however, that is those who may die in the next two months, were not eligible.
- Anybody who got worse rather than getting better on the treatment could be removed from the study thus ensuring that only favourable results were counted. People who do not improve are counted as successes.
- Improvement would be essentially self-reported.
- Bizarrely, in the middle of the document it starts talking about cancer of the ovary (word processor find-and-replace failure?). While the ovaries are located somewhere near the cervix one would hope that a competent medical investigator would be aware that they are different things.
Another peculiar aspect of the Burzynski trials is that people have to pay to be experimental subjects and the amounts of money are not insignificant. I recently heard of a young boy whose parents who were trying to raise $14,000 just to get him into the program and were expected to find $4,000 a month to keep him there and I know of another case where parents were trying to raise $125,000 so that their young daughter with a brain tumour could receive "experimental treatment". (See Note 1 below.) Normally, clinical trials are paid for by the person or organisation producing whatever it is to be tested.
It seems that Dr Burzynski cannot legally offer antineoplastons as a cure (or even a treatment) for cancer, but he can offer them to people as part of clinical trials. After the number of trials that have been conducted, and the number of years that the research has been going on, and the number of dollars that must have been collected over the time, it is surprising that the medical literature is not full of success stories and the intensive care wards empty of cancer patients. Unless antineoplastons don't cure cancer and the continuation of patient-funded clinical trials is just a scam.
Dr Burzynski is very welcome to enter the Millenium Project's Cancer 100 Challenge, and nobody would be more pleased than I to see him nominated for a Nobel Prize. Only if he can cure cancer, of course.
Notes:
1. I had a link to a site with an appeal to raise money for this case but I removed the link out of respect for the girl's parents, who thought that the site had been closed after their daughter died. They did not need that sort of reminder of their heartbreak. I could not bring myself to ask the parents whether the full $125,000 had been paid for the unsuccessful "treatment".
2. Update 1 August 2001 - All clinical trail information and protocols have now been removed from the Burzynski web site and it openly talks about treatments. It seems that the farce of pretending to conduct trials has now been dropped.
A Burzynski advertising site won the Anus Maximus Award in the 2000 Millenium Awards. You can see the disgusting details here.
An objection. My responses are in italics:
Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2004 14:12:47 -0500
From: IKRA_Centre_de_Santé Optimale
Subject:
Dear Sir,
It seems that you hype the conventional ways of treating cancer. Please have a look at www.ouralexander.org.
This is an advertising site for Dr Burzynski. I was surprised to find that someone would use his own dead son in an advertising campaign until I found out that Michael Horwin was doing the PR for murderer Alan Yurko (he withdrew when the money ran out).
Alexander went through the conventional way of surgery and chemotherapy for brain cancer.
The last time I looked at the site it said that the Horwins were on Burzynski's doorstep six weeks after Alexander had been diagnosed. There was no possibility that he could have undergone all the claimed treatments in that time. Put another way, Michael Horwin was lying. Remember, this site was probably paid for by Burzynski, and you should not always believe what you read in advertisements.
His parents wanted to go the alternative way with Dr. Bryzynski and the FDA denied them this.
As it should. Burzynski's "treatment" had shown no effectiveness in the 20 years that he had been pretending to run clinical trials.
The parents were promised the latest in chemotherapy drugs, which some of turned out to be over 30 years old.
So what? I did a radio interview this week with someone who runs a school of complementary medicine. One of her claims for effectiveness of the pills and potions was that some had been in use for thousands of years.
The father put together this site to warn parents about conventional treatments which have been proven over and over to be useless, toxic and mortal for children (look at the the quoted oncology studies on the site).
The father put the site together because doing publicity and advertising was what he did for a living.
Before you start putting others down, check and see what conventional chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation offers children, absolutely nothing.
Other than an up to 80% chance for a complete cure. Burzynski claims to have treated more than 8,000 patients, but his supporters have told me that he does not claim to have cured any of them.
Sincerely,
Craig Cormack
From: "Dee Dee"
Subject: I notice...
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:49:26 -0500
You've still got the name Stan Burzynski in a rant about cancer frauds. Given the fact that the AMA and ACS, and even MD Anderson Cancer Institute in Houston (his major haters) have been sucking up to him for a LONG time now, maybe you ought to amend that so people Googling him don't run onto your Y2Kish rant about a man who has been vindicated.
Just a FYI.
To which I replied:
So the old fraud has cured someone now, has he, after 8,000+ failed attempts?
There is one and only one mention of the quack on the AMA web site (http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/13638.html) where, in 1997, they said:
Some methods proposed for study and further dissemination have been associated with proponents using questionable methods and possibly fraudulent research. Several of these are cancer therapies, including "antineoplastons," popularized by a physician named Burzynski who claims he can "normalize" tumor cells by shutting off their undifferentiated growth using peptides extracted from urine. A review of this method in JAMA concludes that no objective evidence exists to support the experimental claims.
That's some "sucking up". And so recent too.
There is one and only one mention of the quack on the ACS web site (http://www.cancer.org/docroot/ETO/content/ETO_5_3X_Antineoplaston_Therapy.asp?sitearea=ETO) where they say:
Although some proponents of antineoplaston therapy have suggested that the reviews of this treatment by conventional cancer specialists are biased by mistrust of alternative therapies, even some prominent figures in alternative medicine have reservations about antineoplastons. According to Dr. Andrew Weil, author and physician, founder and director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona ,"Over the years, Dr. Burzynski claims to have treated more than 8,000 patients, but his success rates are unknown. His Web site states only that he has helped "many" people. If antineoplaston therapy works, we should have scientific studies showing what percentage of patients treated have survived and for how long, as well as evidence showing how Dr. Burzynski's method stacks up against conventional cancer treatment. … Until we have credible scientific evidence showing what antineoplastons are, how they act in the body, and what realistic expectations of treatment with them might be, I see no reason for any cancer patient to take this route."
That's some "sucking up" And note how a supporter of quackery is quoted by the ACS. Even quacks think that Burzynski is a fraud.
The only people sucking up to Burzynski and his ilk are those who believe that any lie told to someone with cancer is acceptable as long as it assists the flow of money from patient to charlatan.
And you misspelled "exposed as a fraud". That is not what "vindicated" means.
Just a FYI.
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