Back Goldfinch looking backwards

Article in Washington Post of November 26, 2012 on the crime (my word) in the process of bringing GlaxoSmithKline’s new diabetes drug Avidia to market. Link to pdf.

Homeopathy and other strange properties of highly dilute solutions. The recent research of Luc Montagnier, who shared the Nobel prize in 2008 for isolating the AIDS virus, presents to the scientific world, which cannot sneer at his scientific credentials, some really astonishing data that the scientific dogmatists nevertheless sneer at. It is interesting to glance over the Google search results for his name: link. In order to understand what he and his coworkers are doing, I read the published papers to date and made my own summary, with copious links to sources. This is available here.

The long and really heroic struggle that Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski has maintained with first the entrenched and self-protective power structure of the Party in Communist Poland, then with the ditto of the drug industry and its FDA mouthpiece in the US is both inspiring and dispiriting. Also highly informative. Even if your oncologist rails against Burzynski as quack/charlatan/fraud, you owe it to yourself to give a little attention to what is said in his defense by a good number of thoughtful people.

In fact we all owe it to each other to become better informed about the workings of the FDA and the drug-medical industrial complex. The recent film, Burzynski — the Movie, is a good starting place. Notice that the transcript and linked sources are available here. Burzynski’s story is also featured in Cut, Poison, Burn.

The powerful and ugly anti-Burzynski party line is easily found on Wikipedia here. All of the negative claims in the first three paragraphs there are explicitly addressed in the film, which also documents that, contrary to the Wikipedia and others’ claims, phase II trials have been done on antineoplastons, and very successfully when contrasted to other trials with other treatments. Here is a page on the movie website that explicitly speaks to the phase II trials question in great detail — link. When I visited the site on 1-24-13 I found the link to resource [3] had an error that prevented it from taking a visitor to the intended page. However, from the site one can make out the intended page and visit it — here. Click here for an explanation of the core results summarized in that paper by Dr. Burzynski.