The Profit of Medicine

Bear with me here - this is a little off message as it doesn't have anything to do with vaccinations or anti-vaccinationists, but rather focuses on those who push the idea of alternative medicine, or more specifically alternative cancer cures.  Although on second thought I do find a lot of overlap between antivaxxers and those who place their faith in alternative medicine, so in essence this is probably focused on the same group of people.  Nevertheless, I found some of these numbers interesting and couldn't help but put this together to outline just how out of touch some people are about the world around them.

This post this began out of curiosity as so many antivaxxers claim that the only purpose of a vaccine is to generate profits for drug companies (aka: "Big Pharma"), or to individual doctors.  Aside from the fact there is much more money to be made by treating diseases such as polio, smallpox, or rubella than there will ever be by preventing these diseases, there is also the common sense aspect of this theory that fails to convince.  You see, to believe vaccines are merely a method to profit suggests that tens of thousands or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of clinicians, researchers, scientists, doctors, medical experts, federal regulators, and industry watchdogs are all somehow involved in some massive conspiracy and refuse to speak out because they risk missing out on their cut of that $23 vaccine given to a toddler.  To a reasonable person this line of reasoning doesn't even pass a smell test.

That aside, why is that that the proponents of alternative medicine never seem to care about the money being made by those who are so obviously anti-vaccine or pro-alternative medicine?  Why is there never a mention of how Dr. Blaylock profits from his many newsletters or his miracle brain repair pills.  Why does nobody seem to care when Andy Moulden (a man who doesn't even have a license to practice medicine) was offering his professional diagnostic service where he could tell you if a child had a neurological condition based upon a few photographs or a videotape?  Why the lack of concern when Dr. Tenpenny offers nutritional supplements that can cost more than $117 for a two month supply or when she offers a $200 "anti-flu" wellness kit which is nothing more than a collection of supplements and vitamins?

To make matters worse, why is the selective outrage non-existent when they find someone like Dr. Tenpenny offering vitamin D supplements for $14.99 when you can get a larger quantity of vitamin D elsewhere on the Internet for less than $5?  Shouldn't these people be outraged that a "doctor" would intentionally gouge people by marking up her products over 300%?  Why do they not seem to care when someone like Dr. Mercola offers a bottle 60 vitamin C capsules for $14.97 while you can head over to Walmart and get 100 tablets for under $7 or 70 vitamin C gummies for under $5?

Why don't they seem to care about antivaxxers making a living off of speaking tours and overpriced supplements?  Why don't they care about alt-med practitioners selling pamphlets or books or DVDs full of their opinions for $60 or $70 even though they don't ever seem to have peer-reviewed research to support their statements?  Doesn't it seem odd that I can download a peer-reviewed paper that involved thousands of hours of research by real scientists and doctors simply by searching Google Scholar and all of that data is available to me for free, yet antivaxxers want to charge me over $60 to watch a home movie of them giving a speech or $50 to get a copy of a PowerPoint presentation that they slapped together in a couple of hours?

The point is - if you are going to chastise someone for profiting from healthcare, why can't you apply this disdain equally?  The truth is, there is a lot of money to be made by pushing alternative viewpoints, and the benefit of doing so is that these people aren't required to provide evidence that their viewpoints are valid provided they include a nice disclaimer on their websites (which all of them do).

So should we place our trust in legitimate peer-reviewed studies written by teams of research scientists that will never directly profit from their research, or should we trust doctors who publish their own books and newsletters filled with unsubstantiated opinion, unscientific statements, and zero verifiable data?

So where does the hypocrisy end?  If we are really going to focus on the money, why can't we apply the same logic to those who seem to profit from alternative medicine?

For instance, what if we were to look at a doctor who claims he can cure cancer? For instance, what about Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski?

• Total number of clinical trials filed by the Burzynski Research Institute: 61
• Total number of Burzynski clinical trials with an unknown status and which have not had any updates in over two years (many of which were originally filed in the 90s): 50
• Total number of Burzynski clinical trials which were withdrawn: 9
• Total number of Burzynski clinical trials which have completed: 1
• Total number of Burzynski clinical trials which are not yet recruiting and yet have been open since 2010: 1
• Total number of Burzynski clinical trials with published results: 0
• Total annual cost to receive antineoplastons treatment from Burzynski: $30,000 - $60,000 or more
• Total per day cost for the Burzynski treatment program (not including other fees): $395
• Total monthly cost charged by Burzynski including all medications: $30,000 or more
• Total appraised value of Burzynski's home:  $4,351,310
• Total real estate taxes paid by Burzynski in 2012: $86,560.53
• Total number of peer-reviewed studies published worldwide showing antineoplaston treatment to be effective including all studies published by Burzynski at any point since he began his research: 0

I should probably point out the one Burzynski clinical trial that has actually been completed was originally started in 1995 and completed in February 2005, yet we still have yet to see any published data from the study.  Wouldn't you think a guy who claims he can cure cancer might be interested in actually publishing the data that might support his claims?  Guess not.  Either that or he isn't a very fast typist... because obviously eight years seems like a long time to actually release the results of the clinical trial.

Truthfully it probably isn't fair to mention that Burzynski lives in a multi-million dollar mansion because simply living in a nice home has no bearing on whether his work is credible.  In addition to that, perhaps we should actually feel sorry for Dr. Burzynski.  After all, his home has lost around $1.5M of value since 2010.  Then again his property taxes have dropped from a high of over $114,000 down to under $87,000 so perhaps we shouldn't feel too bad for him.

The reason I point this out is because it shows you how out of touch people are when speaking about the profit in medicine.  We expect doctors to make a good living.  We expect doctors to generally be considered upper income earners or in some cases even "wealthy" due to the amount of training and education required to become a doctor.  However we don't expect that they profit at the expense of their patients.  We don't expect them to charge thousands of dollars for medications which can be purchased in pharmacies for less than $180.  We don't expect them to charge patients to be part of clinical trials when most clinical trials are done at no cost to the participants.

So why don't those who believe big pharma is simply interested in making money, or those who accuse conventional medical doctors of only caring about the bottom line ever seem to step back and ask themselves how people like Dr. Mercola or Dr. Burzynski ever became multimillionaires while the traditional GP working in a clinic and giving vaccines to children will never have an income anywhere near that level?

Rest assured patients should always come ahead of profits.  Anyone with a conscious will agree with that statement, and I'm sure the vast majority of people working in healthcare today would overwhelmingly agree.  The truth is, as human beings we have an inherent desire to help others.  People want to leave the world a better place than it was when they entered it, and when push comes to shove most people will do the right thing.  Are there exceptions to the rule?  You bet - the will always be those who put personal greed and their ambitions ahead of others, but the question we need to ask ourselves is how often does this really happen?

It simply isn't logical to believe that hundreds of thousands of people are all putting personal gain ahead of the human race.  It isn't feasible to suspect people care more about their bank accounts than they do their fellow human beings.  It doesn't make sense to claim people are knowingly suppressing cures for diseases such as cancer when there is a very high probability that every one of us will lose someone we know to cancer one day.  Perhaps even scarier is the fact that males have a 1 in 2 chance of contracting some form of cancer in their lifetime and a 1 in 4 chance of dying from cancer while females have a 1 in 3 chance of developing some form of cancer and a 1 in 5 chance of dying from cancer.

So think about that for a second.  What alternative medicine proponents would have us believe is that there are hundreds of thousands of scientists and researchers out there who are all trying to prevent cures to cancer from seeing the light of day all the while knowing they have a very strong chance of one day suffering from cancer themselves.  These alt-med types actually believe these hundreds of thousands of people would put personal profit ahead of their own health and perhaps even their own lives.

Does this make any sense whatsoever?

This is perhaps one of the many reasons why it is so difficult to take the antivaxxers or the proponents of alternative medicine seriously.  If they lack the logic to think through even the most basic of their accusations... how can they be taken seriously when discussing more complex matters such as vaccine efficacy or the peer-review process?

Quack of the Day: Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski

Cancer.  Just the word itself causes people to gasp as they wonder if it will impact them or their loved ones.  If you ask a typical person about their families, chances are they have lost at least one person close to them from cancer, or they may have fought cancer themselves.  In fact, it is estimated that over 40% of the public will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes, so there is good reason to be concerned.

Cancer can impact everyone.  It impacts both men and women, both young and old, and members of all races.  In some cases, if detected early, cancer can be treated and the cancer can be considered to be in remission.  In other cases, a late cancer diagnosis which has metastasized to numerous parts of the body can essentially be a death sentence.  Although treatments have improved and death rates have fallen, there is still no known cure.
Because of this, it is not uncommon for people to fear cancer.  It is not uncommon for cancer patients to try every possible treatment known to man even if some of those treatments are experimental or unproven.  It is also not uncommon for medical conspiracy theorists to proclaim some random doctor or self-proclaimed cancer expert has a miracle cure that can treat cancer patients or that this miracle cure is being suppressed by "Big Pharma", the FDA, AMA, CDC, WHO, or some other random government agency.

This is where Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski comes into play.  Burzynski has positioned himself as a victim.  He claims he can treat and in many cases even suggests he can cure cancer, but because his treatments would negatively impact the pharmaceutical companies or mainstream cancer treatment centers (and thus suggesting it would harm their bottom-line), he is being unfairly targeted and muzzled from speaking the "truth" about cancer.

Thus, Burzynski has decided the best way to get his message out to the masses is to star in a movie about himself to share his story, and of course like all the other alternative medicine mockumentaries prior, the movie serves no legitimate scientific benefit and is heavily biased.  Of course the glaring lack of peer-reviewed science or supporting evidence is irrelevant to a medical conspiracy theorist, and as such the alternative medical proponents such as Lowell Hubbs have latched on to this little film as evidence of some massive conspiracy.  They will even go so far as to cite it as a legitimate source of data, and they will refer to the film as if it was a true unbiased and scientifically supported documentary. 

It really shouldn't surprise anyone that Mr. Hubbs would be a fan of Burzynski, because Mr. Hubbs is a fan of pretty much anyone who labels themselves as a practitioner of alternative medical therapies, or anyone who has ever positioned themselves as the antithesis to mainstream modern medicine.  Thus, true to form, Mr. Hubbs has inundated my inbox with comment after comment bragging about Burzynski and his miracle cancer cures.

Burzynski himself isn't exactly new to the cancer scene, and he has been involved in his research for around 35 years.  Burzynski focuses upon what he calls "antineoplaston therapy" and he offers his treatments at his clinic located in Houston, Texas.  Initially, Burzynski was extracting these antineoplastons from urine he collected from the restrooms in public parks (which is why Mr. Hubbs has stated in the past that a doctor was able to cure cancer by extracting a substance from urine), but later Burzynski synthesized the antineoplastons in a lab as it was obviously much easier, and much less expensive.

It should be noted that antineoplaston therapy has never been approved by the FDA, and Burzynski has published no peer-reviewed science in support of his treatments.  Burzynski has been approved to perform FDA testing on his treatments, yet to date, no phase III randomized, controlled trials of antineoplastons as a treatment for cancer have been conducted.  Ever.  Read that again - in the 35 years that Burzynski has been performing clinical trials on antineoplastons, no phase III randomized, controlled trials of antineoplastons as a treatment for cancer have been conducted.  This means that Burzynski has never performed a study to compare his antineoplaston therapy against more conventional therapies, and it doesn't appear he has any immediate plans to do so.

Burzynski has actually performed some clinical trials, namely phase I and phase II trials, yet the results of those trials remain unpublished.  Out of 61 clinical trials listed under Burzynski's name, 50 of them are in an unknown status, seven have been withdrawn, two were terminated, one is not yet recruiting, and in one single case, Burzynski has actually finished his phase II clinical trial.  So out of a total of 61 trials reported in the past 35 years only one has been finished, yet where is the peer-reviewed science showing the magical results?  The reality is, 60 of the 61 trials listed are phase II clinical trials, and the only phase III trial listed is the one that states it is not yet recruiting.  The information was submitted in December 2010 with a start date listed as December 2011 and a completion date of December 2015, yet there haven't been any updates and it appears it still pending as "not yet open for participant recruitment".

Based upon this information, we only have one single study to focus upon, and that was the phase II trial that dealt with how well antineoplaston therapy works in treating patients with progressive or recurrent stage IV melanoma.  The trial was started in 1996 and shows as completed in 2005, so what is the explanation on why the results haven't been published?

If the results don't prove that antineoplaston therapy is effective, then why is he continuing to promote it?  If the results do suggest that antineoplaston therapy is effective in treating cancer, why hasn't the data been published for all to see?  What purpose does it serve to suppress data if he has faith in the outcome of his clinical trial?  The fact is antineoplaston therapy is still considered experimental, so why is Burzynski promoting it as a legitimate treatment even before publishing results of his own studies?

As you can see there are a lot of questions, but Burzynski doesn't appear to be offering many answers.  It seems that although he can't legally treat patients with antineoplaston therapy, he can enroll them into one of his many clinical trials, so this little loophole has allowed Burzynski to operate his clinic for 35 years even though he has never published any results from those trials in any reputable peer-reviewed journals.  One might assume that such a "visionary" would want to share his treatments and clinical results with the world in order to have an honest impact upon the future of cancer treatments... but alas that doesn't appear to be the case with Burzynski.

Of course Burzynski is no stranger to controversy or the courtroom either.  He has been involved in various court cases since at least 1983, ranging from violations of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to  fraud to... well more fraud.  It seems most recently, Burzynski has found himself being investigated once again by the Texas Medical Board, although that case is currently pending and a hearing is scheduled for April 2012.

It also appears that Burzynski doesn't take kindly to people challenging his viewpoints.  In cases where someone calls out his nonsense, he has staff members send them threatening email messages as he recently did to Rhys Morgan in response to a blog posting Mr. Morgan published.  He also did the same to Le Canard Noir (Andy Lewis) for a post he wrote entitled The False Hope of the Burzynski Clinic and he did the same to Peter Bowditch. 

I'm sure there are others, but perhaps if Burzynski would spend as much time focused upon producing scientific data as a result of his neverending clinical trials rather than chasing after random bloggers who happen to think he is a fraud or a quack, he might actually get somewhere.  Then again, it is safe to say if the results of his ongoing trials were actually impressive, we would have read about them decades ago.

It would seem when you really examine the data, Burzynski simply doesn't have the science or research to support his viewpoints, and I find it disturbing that he promotes the myth that he can so easily cure cancer without any scientific basis to make such a claim.  He gives cancer victims and family members false hope, and he hasn't shown his treatments are effective at anything other than shrinking the size of a person's bank account.

I of course could go into much more detail about Burzynski, his impressive claims, his lack of scientific data, and his little movie, but why repeat what has already been done?

1. Stanislaw Burzynski: Bad medicine, a bad movie, and bad P.R.
2. Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s “personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy”: Can he do what he claims for cancer?
3. Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, antineoplastons, and the selling of an orphan drug as a cancer cure
4. Quackwatch: Stanislaw Burzynski and "Antineoplastons"
5. Dr. Saul Green's Letter to the Washington Post
6. The Compassion Gambit

Of course if you are really, really interested - here is a list of blogs which speak about Burzynski, his treatments, his lack of published science, and much, much more.

All of this aside, claims that a miracle cure exists for cancer won't even hold up against common sense.  Cancer is not just one lone medical condition that responds to a one-size-catch-all treatment.  Cancer encompasses many different forms of the disease which all present themselves differently and which respond to treatments differently.  To suggest there is any one treatment that can so easily cure so many various forms of cancer immediately raises suspicion.

If such a cure was readily available, and if such a cure actually worked the medical insurance industry would be spending tens of millions of dollars to ensure the studies were fully funded and that the treatment was in widespread use. Conventional cancer treatments can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars or even more, yet Burzynski's antineoplastons can be synthesized and are available from medical suppliers for as little as 80 cents per dose. Doesn't that seem like something the insurance industry could get behind in order to drastically slash their costs and improve their profits?

Either way, we find ourselves in familiar territory here because once again we are being told the only reason these miracle cures aren't in widespread use is because there is some conspiracy at work.  Burzynski staff members, medical conspiracy theorists, alternative medical gurus, and "Internet researchers" are quick to list any number of excuses on why Burzynski's hypothesis have yet to be published or why there is no peer-reviewed science supporting his claims, but at the end of the day that is just what they are... excuses.

The reality is antineoplastons have been studied elsewhere outside of Burzynski's clinic, and yet there have been no indications that they work as well as Burzynski has claimed.  Japanese scientists at the Kurume University School of Medicine have studied antineoplastons as have researchers from Mansoura University in Mansoura, Egypt.  Their results generally reflect a lack of activity, however that isn't to say there isn't any benefit to them at all or that continued research is worthless, but the current reality is they are not a miracle cure as we have been led to believe. 

If antineoplastons are really as effective as Burzynski claims, or if they are a viable cancer treatment, then by all means Burzynski has the option... or rather the duty, to publish his findings for all to see.  I think we all know why that hasn't happened - and it has more to do with keeping the steady flow of scared, ignorant patients coming through the doors year after year than it does from his research somehow being suppressed or manipulated.

Meanwhile people continue to die from cancer each and every day while proponents of complimentary and alternative medicine (CAM) attempt to convince us that cancer can be cured via unproven treatments and snakeoil. 

Some people have no shame... and unfortunately in this case that lack of shame leads to false hope, increased suffering, and unnecessary expense.