We?re coming up on Burzynski?s 70th birthday ? it?s a bit ironic that the man responsible for so many shattered hopes has had such a long life himself ? and there is a plan to remind him of the grief he has caused.
Burzynski, if you?ve forgotten, is the guy who claims to have a cancer treatment called antineoplastons, a small set of compounds isolated from urine that he injects at high dosages into cancer patients. These drugs have not had their efficacy demonstrated, but Burzynski keeps cycling through clinical trials, taking the preliminary steps to demonstrating scientific utility, but never quite advancing the results to the point where they can demonstrate significance. He?s cunning that way; by constantly playing the game and running the mill of phase II trials, he puts up a pretense of scientific seriousness, but he never goes further, where his snake oil would be shown to be ineffective. Burzynski?s claims are total nonsense.
What he does do is promise remarkable results, and bilk people out of buckets of money ? tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars gouged out of desperate patients ? and then go home to his 6 million dollar, gated, wooded estate. Crime does pay, and it pays well. This fraud is living in luxury while his patients pour money into his clinic in the frantic hope that maybe the sciencey-sounding jargon of his well-practiced spiel means they?ll really get a cure.
They don?t. You can read the accounts of the other Burzynski patients ? the ones he?d rather you didn?t know about. The Burzynski clinic is a place you go to die, and pay extravagantly for the privilege.
Right now, he and his propagandists are claiming to be doing ?Personalized Gene-Targeted Cancer Therapy?, and touting the relevance of information from the human genome project for their treatment. But they?re still just injecting people with concentrated extracts of human urine! The lies are simply outrageous, but nothing seems to hinder him from making them.
Burzynski has plenty of lawyers and has fended off many attempts to shut down his quackery, so what can you do? We can raise money for a legitimate cancer center, St Jude?s Children?s Hospital, and challenge him on his birthday to match our contributions. The goal is to raise at least $30,000, an amount that is minuscule compared to the millions he has bilked from the sick and dying, but the point is to shame the man, and maybe get some money redirected to legitimate hospitals, where it can do some real good.
Read the latest on Burzynski from Science-Based Medicine, and get angry/inspired. Every penny raised does double-duty, making both a contribution to real medical work, and helping to raise attention about this shameless quack.
Donate!
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/01/06/lets-make-houston-cancer-quack-burzynski-pay/
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