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.
