Oncologist and cancer-woo-debunker Orac has more on the legal details that allow this man to keep practicing medicine in Texas: "the dubious doctor known as Stanislaw Burzynski, who charges desperate patients with advanced (and usually incurable) cancer tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in his 'clinical trials' of antineoplastons, compounds that he claims to have isolated from urine and that he now represents as a promising new treatment that can do much better than existing therapies with much less toxicity, even though there’s no evidence that it can."

The Texas Medical Board has abandoned its prosecution of Burzynski, as noted in a previous Boing Boing post here with guest commentary by fellow anti-cancer-woo writer Robert Blaskiewicz.

The legal underpinnings of the case will be interesting to some, and too tedious for others, but here's the tl;dr from Orac's post: the outcome does not make the case that Burzynski's "science" is valid. The board simply found that, "as a matter of law, the TMB couldn’t bring action against Burzynski on the basis of actions performed by doctors under his supervision."

I’m not going to lie or downplay it here. The dismissal of the TMB action against Burzynski is a major setback to efforts to stop what Burzynski is doing. He’s now basically free to continue to do what he’s been doing for the last thirty years. Once burned, it’s unlikely that the TMB will take another crack at him any time soon. The last time it did was back in the 1990s. Will it be in the 2020s before a future board decides to try again, or will Burzynski retire or die before then, leaving his son Greg to carry on the family business?

The fact that the Texas Medical Board lost this fight is nothing short of a tragedy for desperate cancer patients and their families throughout America. It means more cancer patients who are afraid of dying and don't understand oncology enough to know when they're being lied to by an exploitative opportunist will face a very bleak fate indeed. We who have cancer deserve real medicine. We deserve honest care. We deserve a legal system that protect us from quacks who treat our desperation as an opportunity to cash in.

Update: Fred Trotter writes, in the comments below:

We are using Stanislaw as an example case for exercising our DocGraph (related Wired News article). Interesting facts so far: It appears as though Stanislaw is not billing Medicare at all (makes sense). There are several doctors that share an address with Stanislaw, so it is possible to detect and "name" his "team", and they do not appear to bill Medicare either. This kind of utterly isolated medical team might be something that can be used to find other qwacks? not sure, but it is interesting data.

I loved Science Blogs contributor Orac before I was diagnosed with cancer. I love him a whole lot more now. I'll get to why in a moment, but I want to share something personal first (cracks knuckles).

Well-meaning friends have suggested I try coffee enemas and Burzynskian "antineoplastons" and oxygen therapy to cure my breast cancer; others have told me the reason some of my cells went mutinous is because I offended the Great Invisible Beardy Man in the Sky.

Dude, I've heard it all.

I am active on Twitter in talking about cancer, sharing the experience of my treatment (which fucking sucks), and connecting with fellow persons with cancer.

One of those fellow travelers yesterday tweeted this link, which praises the work of "ND" Judy Seeger. In alternative healing parlance, ND stands for naturopathic doctor. I like Orac's definition better: "not a doctor."

Let me be blunt: I think people who sell fake cancer cures are murderers.

I spoke about the content of that blog post with my radiation oncologist yesterday, after I lay down under the linear accelerator for another daily (yep, daily) blast of rays to kill any remaining lurking cells that might want to off me a few years down the road.

I hate radiation treatment, by the way. HATE IT. But I hate cancer more.

The tl;dr of the conversation I had in the exam room with my rad-onc: medicine isn't perfect, and people who work in the health care system, like my doc, know many aspects of it are broken. Many of them will tell you they are frustrated at how brutal the effects of radiation, chemo, and surgery are on those of us who must endure. But this is the best we have, for now.

Green smoothies are great, but they alone cannot cure cancer. Oncology isn't guaranteed to cure us, but quackery is guaranteed to kill us. What doctors like my rad-onc practice is constantly under scrutiny, and has endured the test of peer-reviewed science and empirical logic. It is the best we have. Rattlesnake powder, laetrile, and squirting espresso up your ass (real things that real people have told me I should do instead of sciencey-medicine) is not.

There are no dark Big Pharma cabals hiding a secret cure for cancer (aka "THE TRUTH," in all caps, as natural cure proponents are wont to type in blog comments). The FDA isn't "hiding" the cure for cancer, either. Believe me, the medical industry would find a way to popularize and profit from that cure, if it did exist. And I'd be first in line, if it worked.

Anyway, about Orac. He tears down naturopathic cancer cures in this post. And in this one, today, he explores the idea of "alternative medicine" as a faith-based religion.

"What we are doing (or trying to do)," writes Orac, is to rely on science rather than faith."

The longer I study alternative medicine and alternative medical systems, the more it becomes clear to me that they show far more similarity to religion than they do to science. It’s true that alt-med apologists dress up their beliefs in language that sounds scientific, but when you scratch the patina of scientific language off, it doesn’t take long to find the religious imagery, often facilitated by the more conventional religious beliefs (i.e, Christianity) of the believer. We see the same thing with respect to evolution denial. So why not with denial of scientific medicine? A nonscientific world view that is based on faith in things that can’t be seen is often not confined to church.

If you haven't spent a ton of time thinking about cancer like I have—and I didn't think about it much before I was diagnosed—you might not know that some idiots actually believe that people like me get cancer because they think bad thoughts. Or conversely, because they don't think enough good thoughts. I'm not kidding. Read the Orac posts. And pass them on to anyone who has cancer, and is frightened and desperate and thinking about ditching science for faith.

I believe cancer patients have every right to choose whatever course of treatment we want, including no treatment at all. But lies and false hope have no place in our lives, least of all when our lives are threatened by a disease that wants to kill us.

If I had fake cancer, I'd totally use fake cancer cures. But I have real cancer.

Friends don't let friends believe in bullshit science.

— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) May 7, 2012

My introduction to Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury happened around the age of 8, when I discovered my father's anthology collections. (I was extraordinarily up on early 1970s pop culture for a late 1980s grade schooler.) Reading the new strip and the daily archives is still part of my morning routine. But, given that I was born in 1981, I don't always get all the references. Sometimes, that leads me to discover weird bits pop history.

For instance, the strip above ran on July 19, 1977. My first response this morning, "What the hell is Laetrile?" I mean, it's Duke, so I assumed it was a drug. But I wasn't expecting it to turn out to be a quack cancer treatment, the promotion of which led to a strange bedfellows situation where alt-med proponents joined forces with the John Birch Society to fight the federal government for the right to sell desperate cancer patients a potentially dangerous treatment that had never been tested for effectiveness or safety.

Laetrile is basically the brand name of amygdalin, a compound derived from bitter almonds, or from the pits of apricots and black cherries. It's sometimes called "Vitamin B17", although it's not a vitamin. Beginning in the 1950s, the father-son team of Dr. Ernst T. Krebs and Ernst T. Krebs, Jr. (The latter's only claim to a medical license was a "doctor of science" degree bestowed on him honorarily by an unaccredited Bible college) began marketing Laetrile as a treatment for cancer.

The downside to Laetrile is that it can break down and turn into cyanide in the presence of stomach chemicals. Also, it doesn't actually seem to do anything to cure or slow the progress of cancer. The upside to Laetrile is that selling it was extremely lucrative.

John Richardson was a general practitioner who began practice in the San Francisco Bay area in 1954. In 1971, after discussions with Krebs, Jr., he decided to become a cancer specialist. He had not encountered overwhelming success as a general practitioner. His 1972 income tax return revealed that he had grossed $88,000 in his medical practice, leaving a net of only $10,400 taxable income.

Richardson's practice boomed as a result of his newly found status as a cancer "expert." He states that "Our office soon was filled with faces we had never seen before—hopeful faces of men and women who had been abandoned by orthodox medicine as hopeless or "terminal" cases." In 1974, he reported that his medical practice had grossed $783,000, with a net income of $172,981. By charging patients $2,000 for a course of Laetrile, Richardson managed to increase his net income 17-fold in just two years. According to his income tax returns, Richardson grossed $2.8 million dollars from his Laetrile practice between January 1973 and March 1976. The actual amount of money he received may have even been higher. In Laetrile Case Histories, he claimed to have treated 4,000 patients, with an average charge of $2,500 per patient. Culbert states that by 1976 Richardson had treated 6,000 patients. If these figures are correct, Richardson would have grossed between $10 and $15 million dollars during this time.

Richardson's practice changed significantly after he began treating cancer patients with Laetrile. He also began treating what he termed "pre-clinical syndrome" patients with Laetrile. These were patients with no identifiable tumor or lesion who complained of feelings of "impending doom, malaise, unexplained or vague pains, headaches, bowel changes, loss of appetite, loss of energy, and depression." According to Richardson, cancer patients reported a reduction in pain, an improved appetite, return of strength, and an improved mental outlook. In addition, high blood pressure returned to normal.

In spite of these "dramatic improvements," Richardson admitted that most of his cancer patients died.

Cases like this one led to raids and prosecutions, as state and federal government authorities started cracking down on doctors for selling the bogus treatment. Richardson, for instance, was indicted in 1976.

Proponents fought back. Laetrile ended up in the Supreme Court in 1979—where justices rejected the idea that treatments given to terminally ill patients should be exempt from FDA regulation. And in 1977, when this Doonesbury comic came out, Laetrile was the subject of a Congressional hearing.

The full history is pretty amazing. Public interest in Laetrile petered off in the 1980s, after a National Cancer Institute study found no evidence that it worked (and did find evidence of cyanide poisoning in patients using it), and after actor Steve McQueen infamously used Laetrile to treat his cancer ... and then died. But there are still people pushing it. Because of that, it's worth noting that meta-reviews of research into Laetrile treatments for cancer, conducted in 2006 and again in 2011, still say the stuff doesn't work and that it's potentially dangerous.

Read the Quackwatch history of Laetrile, which is quoted above.

Read Wikipedia's entry on Laetrile, which refers to it as "a canonical example of quackery" in the medical literature.

Read the abstract for the 2011 review of research into Laetrile as a treatment for cancer.

Read The American Cancer Society's summary of the history and evidence (or, rather, lack thereof) behind Laetrile

In Wales, 77 year old Reginald Gill has been sent to prison for 8 years after falsely "diagnosing" cancer for women who sought health aid.

Gill, who is not a doctor, gave the women phony homeopathic treatment for their phonily-diagnosed cancer, including the use of these bogus healing machines and a form of electroshock therapy.

He told one woman she could be cured of cancer if a man sucked her breasts for half an hour each day.

He sexually assaulted victims in a variety of ways, including sticking gadgets up orifices:

[One] victim, who had experience of and was interested in alternative therapies, told the court that Mr Gill had examined her internally before telling her she had cancer and that he could "get rid of most of it today".

He then inserted an instrument inside her which gave her electric shocks. The court was told that after 20 minutes Mr Gill removed the machine and he and Mrs Gill rubbed oil on her chest before using another machine on the same area.

Initially the victim had told police that she didn't think Mr Gill was getting any sexual gratification but she later said his heavy breathing suggested he was.

Some of his victims were men; some did, in fact, have cancer. The Gill case was first exposed on a BBC television program.

All of this is yet another reason to run screaming when offered "alternative" treatment for cancer. But it's not just the woo-peddlers, homeopaths, and quacks: when I was trying to find a place to go get my first mammogram, I remember reading online reviews of one local women's breast cancer screening clinic. Reviews written by women who'd gone there. Those reviews detailed first-hand accounts of sexually inappropriate touching and skeevy come-on vibes, from the male medical practitioner who ran the clinic. Cancer patients, and women in particular, beware.