rss-bridge 2026-02-23T08:00:00+00:00

MAHA: Everything old is new again, except this time antiscience cranks (like Stanislaw Burzynski) are in charge

Returning from my hiatus, I couldn't decide on a specific new topic, mainly because so much bad stuff happened in my absence. So, in this post I back up a bit to reflect on how RFK Jr.'s "make America healthy again" is nothing new. What is new is that the antiscience-cranks are in charge.
The post MAHA: Everything old is new again, except this time antiscience cranks (like Stanislaw Burzynski) are in charge first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

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I am returning from a two-week bereavement-related hiatus. Longtime readers deserve to know that two weeks ago my mother died after a long illness, and the funeral was held on Saturday. Since my father died a couple of weeks before Christmas 2024, I have been primarily in charge of my mother’s finances and house since then. Over the last year and a half my sister and I visited my mother several times a week and my sister from out of town would come in when she could; quite frankly, I’m feeling a strange emptiness from not knowing what to do with those many hours a week spent with Mom as her cognition and health declined. Coming back, I was seriously tempted to write a more personal post about how, during the three years since my mother’s stroke that resulted in her developing vascular demential and the 14 months since my father’s passing at the end of a long hospitalization, I as a physician have confronted the medical system from the other side, discovering in the process just how much the US healthcare system falls short and how much eldercare in this country stinks, but it’s just too soon. One day I will do such a post, but today is not that day. Feelings are still too raw. Maybe I’ll do it after the estate is taken care of.

Still, this blog beckons, and, although tempted, I really didn’t want to take a third week off because writing my weekly post will help me ease back into my regular routine.

As I contemplated what to write about this week, I must confess to having faced the tsunami of nonsense that has occurred during the three weeks since I last posted here and experienced an uncharacteristic feeling of being overwhelmed. There are so many things that I could have written about. For example, I was highly tempted to write about “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya‘s having been appointed acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that in addition to his role as NIH Director. Let’s just say that his appointment as acting director of the CDC confirmed to me what I have been saying all along. Podcast Jay was never truly in charge of the NIH; he has been and continues to be a figurehead under whom Russell Vought and Matthew Memoli will transform the NIH into a research arm of MAHA and a grant awarding system based, as part of Lysenkoism 2.0, less on scientific merit than on patronage to reward friends of the administration and punish opponents. Similarly, Podcast Jay will not be in charge of the CDC either. He will be the temporary figurehead under which the longtime antivax activist who is currently our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will degrade and ultimately destroy much of the CDC’s public health and vaccination programs. I just had to mention that in case I never get a chance to circle back around to this out in detail.

Instead, for some reason, I kept thinking about how there’s nothing new about RFK Jr.’s “make America healthy again” (MAHA) movement, except that the antiscience cranks, quacks and antivaxxers are firmly in charge. The led me to reflect on one the longest-standing bête noire of pseudoscience, Polish expat turned cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, and how his activities starting 50 years ago and continuing into the 2020s, helped lay a lot of the groundwork for the tactics and tropes of MAHA. There is nothing truly new under the sun in terms of quackery, other than that, even with my knowledge of medical history, I am not aware of a time when not only are the cranks fully in charge but when actual science-based medicine is in retreat.

The odd thing is, with MAHA ascendant and the ideological heirs of Burzynski, such as William Makis, Pierre Kory, and Tess Lawrie (among, sadly, many others) promoting outright cancer quackery in the form of repurposed drugs and at least one legitimate scientist (Dr. Wafik El-Deiry) falling down the MAHA rabbit hole and giving them aid and comfort with his hand-waving cherry-picked science and nonsense supporting the false view that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer, we don’t hear much about Burzynski these days. But he’s still around, having recently celebrated his 83rd birthday still quacking loud and strong at his clinic in Houston.

I’ve been writing a lot about how, starting very early in the pandemic, COVID-19 minimizers, cranks, and quacks have touted “repurposed drugs,” such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, for COVID-19. Then I noted how, as the pandemic was finally starting to wane, they pivoted effortlessly to touting the same repurposed drugs for cancer. William Makis and Pierre Kory have been particularly prodigious in this effort. William Makis, for instance, has been promoting a treatment protocol for cancer involving repurposing drugs like ivermectin and mebendazole, plus a variety of supplements, all while sharing “miracle cure” anecdotes on his Substack (most behind a paywall, of course). He even briefly sucked cartoonist turned MAGA populist Scott Adams, who, sadly, ultimately died of his metastatic prostate cancer last month, Even though he did ultimately abandon Makis’ quackery, he found out that there is no cure for stage IV prostate cancer. None of this stopped Makis from somehow securing a Florida medical license earlier this month, because of course Florida granted him a medical license. As for Kory, he’s been claiming miraculous results from a cancer treatment protocol involving ivermectin for two years now. Let me just remind you that, as good as a drug as it is for treating roundworm-related disease, ivermectin doesn’t work against cancer, the NCI’s decision to reinvent the wheel by restudying the drug in vitro notwithstanding. We’ve known this since 2021, at least, and I highly doubt that new studies will change that.

Again, all of these quacks are the 21st century heirs of Burzynski, who laid the groundwork for them 50 years ago.

Stanislaw Burzynski: From science-based physician to cancer quack

One of the sometimes startling characteristics of the current generation of cancer quacks and grifters who took their heel turn towards quackery during the COVID-19 pandemic is that some of them were pretty well-respected physicians. Makis, of course, was not one of those doctors, as his heel turn occurred years before the pandemic, but Pierre Kory and his cohorts were. So was Wafik El-Deiry. Longtime readers might recall that Stanislaw Burzynski was a highly promising physician who did his training during the 1960s in Poland, which at the time was under the control of a Soviet Communist puppet government. Born in Nazi-occupied Poland in the city of Lublin on January 23, 1943, as the Holocaust in Poland was entering its deadliest phase, Stanislaw Burzynski was mostly sheltered from the grim reality of Nazi-occupied Poland during his earliest years because of his mother’s wealth. After the war, when Burzynski was five, Stanislaw’s older brother Zygmunt was killed fighting the newly installed Communist regime. In his hagiography The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It, Thomas Elias quoted Burzynski invoking his brother thusly, “The idea of fighting people in authority became natural to me. I learned that you must never let them defeat you in your own core.” This sort of determination could have been an admirable trait—if only Burzynski had found a worthy cause to serve.

Sound familiar? This trait, of taking what can be a laudable thing (questioning authority) to extremes that lead away from science and into pseudoscience, seems to be a defining trait of many of the new cancer quacks whose rise occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, this alone is not enough of a similarity to draw a line from Burzynski to ivermectin pushers. It’s a characteristic that seems to have been found in abundance in quacks throughout history dating back decades, if not hundreds of years. What is interesting to me is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s the young Burzynski seemed to be the real deal, an academic physician who applied science to try to improve cancer treatment.

Indeed, by 1967 Burzynski was ready to work on his medical school doctoral research project. He had become interested in differences in the amount and types of peptides found in the blood and urine of renal failure patients and cancer patients. He reported that some of these chemicals were found at high levels in the blood of renal failure patients. He also found that cancer patients had a low level of some of these substances, which were not, it turned out, peptides. Ultimately, his work in this area resulted in a thesis entitled “Investigations on amino acids and peptides in blood serum of healthy people and patients with chronic renal insufficiency.” There is some question that will likely never be resolved about whether Burzynski’s doctoral degree is legitimate, but for purposes of this post I don’t really care. What I care about is what Burzynski has done since.

By 1970, Burzynski decided that he couldn’t stay in Poland anymore. Elias reports that in 1970 Burzynski was being recruited to join the Communist Party but refused to join. This was perhaps the first case, but definitely not the only case, where his stubbornness caused him serious problems. Burzynski learned he was going to be drafted into the Polish Army, where he would be sent to wherever the Soviet Union needed him, but, thanks to the intervention of a prominent scientist, managed to get a passport and get out of Poland before his draft notice was delivered. He arrived, as he has said so many times, at JFK Airport with only $20 in his pocket.

Burzynski stayed with an uncle in The Bronx but soon managed to get a job at the Baylor College of Medicine in the Department of Anesthesia, then headed by Georges Ungar, a Hungarian refugee with whom he hit it off. Ungar was famous for proposing that memory resided in peptides made by the brain, and he tried to “transfer” memory by transferring those peptides from one mouse brain to another. It’s a hypothesis that seemed to be supported by his experiments at the time but faded from favor as more research failed to support it. Burzynski split his time between working on Ungar’s project and working on his own peptides, which he had finally dubbed “antineoplastons. He even managed, with the help of an investigator at M.D. Anderson, to secure an NIH grant in 1974. These years were productive for Burzynski, and he and Ungar published a lot of papers. Burzynski apparently killed a lot of rats in his time at Baylor doing Ungar’s research, which is something I can totally relate to, having dispatched hundreds of mice myself (and hated doing it) while doing angiogenesis research in the 1990s. Basically, rats were trained at tasks by the hundreds, after which they were killed and the peptides from their brains isolated. These peptides were then injected into the brains of other rats in order to see if the “knowledge” could be transferred with the peptides. Fun times!

One thing that seems to have pushed Burzynski to “buck the system” (and become a quack) is similar to the sorts of things that seem to have pushed Kory, for instance, to do the same nearly 50 years later. In 1973, after three years of study, Burzynski had managed to pass the medical board examinations and obtain his Texas medical license. However, as I’ve pointed out before multiple times, he had no U.S. specialty training in oncology. In fact, he doesn’t appear to have had any specialty training even in internal medicine, and an internal medicine residency is a prerequisite to doing an oncology fellowship and becoming a fully-trained oncologist. One thing I couldn’t figure out from either book or any of my other reading is how Burzynski got a license to practice medicine in Texas. Usually, getting such a license requires at least a year of postgraduate medical training (usually an internship) in addition to medical school and passing the national medical board examinations. I can only speculate that whatever postgraduate clinical training Burzynski might have done in Poland must have counted, because I can’t find any reference to him doing any clinical training after arriving at Baylor. That’s not really the most important issue here, but it is a curiosity to me as a physician.

It’s also indicative of the extreme arrogance that Burzynski exhibited at the time. Elias recounts how in 1976 Burzynski thought that because he had obtained his medical license in 1973 he was then qualified to be the principal investigator for the first clinical trial of antineoplastons. He didn’t want to let anyone else be in charge of such a trial, even though it is obvious to me that at the time Burzynski was completely unqualified to run even a small phase I oncology trial. It’s rather instructive to look at what happened here from three different perspectives, the narrative in Elias’ book, as well as the the narrative in a chapter in the rather self-aggrandizing Galileo’s Lawyer: Courtroom Battles in Alternative Health, Complementary Medicine and Experimental Treatments by Richard Jaffe. (Note that Richard Jaffe is now serving as counsel for Children’s Health Defense, the antivax organization founded by RFK Jr. himself, and is lead attorney for at least one CHD lawsuit against vaccine mandates.

So what did happen? From what I can gather from Elias and Jaffe, a confluence of events conspired to push Burzynski towards his fate. Burzynski successfully competed for an NIH grant to study antineoplastons in 1974, but was unable to renew it in 1976; it expired in 1977. In 1976, apparently internal politics led to Ungar’s ouster from the Department of Anesthesia. According to Elias, the new “boss of anesthesiology” (as Burzynski was quoted as putting it) was Lawrence Schumacher, who wasn’t interested in peptide research and didn’t think much of Burzynski. He also, arguably quite appropriately, didn’t think that Burzynski’s research was the sort of research that was appropriate to a department of anesthesia. So Ungar ended up taking a job at the University of Tennessee, and Burzynski had trouble renewing his grant. Apparently, if Burzynski is to be believed, the new cancer research center at Baylor wanted to hire him and even offered him a $30,000 start-up package (respectable at the time), but it also imposed two conditions that were unacceptable to him. First, it wanted the rights to his antineoplaston discovery. This has been common practice at universities for a long time. If an investigator discovers something patentable while working for a university, usually the university will patent it and share a cut with the inventor. Burzynski, however, didn’t want to share. Similarly, although Ungar offered Burzynski a position in Tennessee, Burzynski did not want to follow his friend there because he was afraid that the University of Tennessee would want his antineoplastons, too.

There was another condition, too, and it’s a problem that tells me that from a very early time in Burzynski’s career he didn’t “play by the rules.” However, it was more than that. Not only did he not “play by the rules,” but he didn’t much care for those pesky regulations and ethical codes designed to protect human subjects. Here’s where Elias and Jaffe diverge. According to Jaffe, shortly after he got his medical license Burzynski started a private practice on the side, and that practice became fairly lucrative. According to Jaffe, Burzynski joined someone else’s practice part time. Actually, Elias is inconsistent on this issue, at one point implying that it was Burzynski’s private practice and at another point saying that Burzynski worked for someone named Dr. Walker. Whatever the case was, both agree that before he even tried to undertake clinical trials of antineoplastons at Baylor, Burzynski had been giving ANPs to patients at his private practice. Sound familiar? Many are the COVID quacks turned cancer quacks who did just this.

Still, these similarities are not enough. Quacks in general behave this way. If they are not grifters, they tend to believe so strongly in their quackery that they don’t think ethical considerations apply to them and twist medical ethics to convince themselves that subjecting their quackery to clinical trials to determine if they work and are safe and effective is actually the unethical thing to do. Somehow, though, that doesn’t seem to stop them from charging their patients huge sums of money for their unproven “cures.” As the 1970s careened towards their end, Burzynski was just a quack who, although he had a respectable academic background, had founded his own private clinic, where he charged desperate cancer patients thousands upon thousands of dollars for his “cure.”

There was one unique thing about Burzynski even at this stage. His “cure,” antineoplastons, were peptides isolated from the urine. In order to isolate and concentrate his antineoplastons, Burzynski needed 30 L of urine to isolate the antineoplastons needed to treat one patient, and it had to be human urine. He could also use human blood to isolate them. In his chapter on Burzynski, Jaffe recounts some amusing anecdotes of Burzynski’s early years after leaving Baylor. Back then, he really did isolate ANPs from blood and urine. Apparently before he left Baylor, he got ANPs mainly from blood:

For the previous few years, he had been obtaining antineoplastons from human blood in an unusual way. He got his raw material from the blood of his friends and acquaintances. He would go to parties and public gatherings with IV lines and bottles and beg and cajole his friends and colleagues to donate blood for his research.

After a while, he noticed he was getting fewer and fewer invitations to parties, and, when his friends would see him on campus or the street, they would turn and walk away quickly, pretending they didn’t see him.

This is, of course, a reasonable response.

After he went into practice for himself, Burzynski’s need for raw materials skyrocketed, and the only feasible way to get them was from urine. To get it, Burzynski arranged to install urine collectors in public parks and the state penitentiary system. Most amusingly of all, apparently Burzynski collected urine from Gilley’s Bar, where Urban Cowboy was filmed. One wonders whether John Travolta contributed to some of those early antineoplaston batches.

Burzynski the MAHA pioneer

While the little back story about how Burzynski isolated antineoplastons before he figured out how to synthesize them in the 1980s aside, how did Burzynski help pave the way for MAHA? Some early hints can be found, in of all places, in three issues of Penthouse published in the late 1970s. I first wrote about the three-part story Penthouse feature written by longtime quackery promoter Gary Null nearly 13 years ago, and these issues represent quite the time capsule into the cancer-focused proto-MAHA movement. How this series came about probably has to do with Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s belief in cancer quackery, which resulted in three articles published in successive issues of Penthouse: The Great Cancer Fraud by Gary Null and Robert Houston; The Suppression of Cancer Cures by Gary Null, which tells the story of Burzynski, c.1979; and Alternative Cancer Therapies by Gary Null and Anne Pitrone. You can either read the articles yourself or read my summary of them from 13 years ago, but together they portray Burzynski as a “brave maverick” whose cancer “cure” is being suppressed by the American Cancer Society and big pharma (The Great Cancer Fraud), and relating his antineoplastons to a longstanding bit of “folk medicine,” namely urine therapy (The Suppression of Cancer Cures), all while comparing Burzynski to Louis Pasteur, Ignaz Semmelweis, and Galileo.

Indeed, the myth-making and legend-building clearly had begun before Null wrote his article, the rest of which followed a script that was new back in 1979 but has become old and tiresome now. Any time anyone or any professional organization investigated Burzynski for unethical conduct, in this case administering his antineoplastons to patients even though (1) they were not approved drugs, (2) he hadn’t done any tests in animal tumor models yet, and (3) he wasn’t doing proper clinical trials, all of which were indications for an investigation, it couldn’t possibly have been because there were legitimate concerns about his activities. Oh, no. To Burzynski and his supporters like Null, it was (and still is) because the medical establishment was closing ranks to suppress a promising new cancer therapy.

The third article, Alternative Cancer Therapies, told a story of a number of clinics, several of which still existed 13 years ago (34 years after the Penthouse trilogy had been published) and several of which have found their way into MAHA, such as homeopathy and orthomolecular medicine (functional medicine hadn’t been invented in the late 1970s), using protocols that could include combinations of woo including laetrile, high dose vitamin C, and protocols involving combinations of therapies, such as chelation therapy, various nutritional interventions, “detoxification,” intravenous H2O2 (peroxide) and/or vitamin C.

While these are interesting as a historical interest, what caught my attention was the emphasis on “health freedom” and a lack of concern for clinical trials. This is where Burzynski made his first key “innovations,” although these advances in the proto-MAHA cause didn’t occur until the 1990s, with the help of Jaffe, who was Burzynski’s longtime lawyer until Burzynski stiffed him for legal bills. Before I discuss this, let me point out that antineoplastons do not work; there is abundant evidence of this that I reviewed in an article for Skeptical Inquirer in 2014. Indeed, From the late 1970s to the turn of the millennium , Burzynski was under nearly constant investigation by medical authorities, beginning with the Harris County Medical Society in 1979, and continuing with the Texas Medical Board and the FDA. Indeed, since the 1970s, the Texas Medical Board tried to strip Burzynski of his license to practice at least twice, failing to do so in 1993 and most recently in 2012.

To neutralize authorities, Burzynski “pioneered” three tactics in the 1990s. First, he mobilized his cancer patients into a sympathetic and persuasive force that could be weaponized against legislators, the Texas Medical Board, and federal regulatory agencies who were trying to hold him to account. Second, he cultivated powerful allies in the Texas and federal legislatures including in particular Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas), who held a series of hearings featuring cancer patients who were, quite understandably, terrified that Burzynski would be convicted. (Remember, these patients were completely convinced that Burzynski was the only person who could save them.) Between the cynical political theater, featuring weeping parents of children with brain tumors, national press stories of demonstrations featuring patients chanting “FDA go away! Let me live another day!” and the intense political pressure brought to bear by Barton, who dragged then-FDA Director David Kessler in front of his committee four times over two years to explain why the FDA was “harassing” Burzynski, the FDA ultimately relented and entered negotiations to let Burzynski set up clinical trials. Taking advantage of the ruling and the political pressure on the FDA, Burzynski and Jaffe decided, in essence, “If the judge wants clinical trials, we’ll give him clinical trials.” So that’s just what they did.

Guess what? Burzynski was among the first to pervert and weaponize the clinical trial process in order to let him continue to ply his quackery unmolested. How he did it in the 1990s was different than the weaponization of clinical trials today, but he and Jaffe twisted clinical trials to their quack ends nearly 30 years ago. His patient groups and contacts in Congress allowed him to do this in order to counter prosecution by the FDA for administering unapproved medications. First, patients already being treated were enrolled in a wastebasket trial known as “CAN-1,” a retrospective trial looking at all patients then being treated at the Burzynski Clinic. Of this trial, Jaffe wrote:

The CAN-1 protocol had almost two hundred patients in it and there were at least a dozen different types of cancers being treated. And since all the patients were already on treatment, there could not be any possibility of meaningful data coming out of the so-called clinical trial. It was all an artifice, a vehicle we and the FDA created to legally give the patients Burzynski’s treatment. The FDA wanted all of Burzynski’s patients to be on an IND, so that’s what we did.

The FDA also permitted Burzynski to set up nearly identical phase 2 trials for every cancer that he wanted to treat. Burzynski claimed these were based on a protocol used in a trial done by the National Cancer Institute in the early 1990s when the NCI had tried to work with Burzynski. (This effort failed because of strife between the NCI and Burzynski, who viewed the NCI as trying to sabotage the trial. These trials had but one purpose, to allow Burzynski to continue treating patients with ANPs, as Jaffe himself boasted in his book:

CAN-1 allowed Burzynski to treat all his existing patients. That solved the patients’ problems, but not the clinic’s. A cancer clinic cannot survive on existing patients. It needs a constant flow of new patients. So in addition to getting the CAN-1 trial approved, we had to make sure Burzynski could treat new patients. Mindful that he would likely only get one chance to get them approved, Burzynski personally put together seventy-two protocols to treat every type of cancer the clinic had treated and everything Burzynski wanted to treat in the future.

The prosecution thus undermined, the first trial ended in a hung jury in 1997, and a second trial on a subset of the original charges resulted in Burzynski’s acquittal. Since then, Burzynski has practiced (mostly) untroubled by the law, other than intermittent FDA inspections and warning letters, none of which succeeded in shutting down his clinic. He also pioneered some MAHA cronyism. For example, chair of the IRB at the Burzynski Institute was for a long time an old Burzynski crony from Baylor and the current chair of the board of directors at the Institute, Carlton F. Hazlewood.

Of course, MAHA weaponizes clinical trials in the same and different ways. They do it the same way by using rather “fluid” requirements for clinical trial evidence necessary to support approving therapies that MAHA likes (e.g., stem cells, peptides, supplements, and the like), while invoking a fundamentalist version of evidence-based medicine (EBM) to require unethical and impractical clinical trials of new vaccines (and possibly even new versions of existing vaccines, such as influenza vaccines) before approval. Before Burzynski, the proto-MAHA movement just invoked the tired old quack trope about knowing that the quackery worked and that the quacks were too busy curing patients to bother with those pesky old clinical trials. Post-Burzynski, quacks do sometimes invoke that argument, but they often try to co-opt clinical trials to give the appearance of efficacy—or at least to be able argue that what they are doing is legitimate experimental medicine. All of this is now bedecked with the glittery label of “gold standard science” or “best practices,” both terms used to justify unscientific and pseudoscientific practices justified in large part by the perversion of the clinical trial process. For MAHA as for Burzynski, clinical trials are and always have been a means to an end: In Burzynski’s case, it was to let him give ANPs to patients unmolested by the authorities. In MAHA’s case in 2026, it is to serve as a scientific-seeming justification for FDA approval of quackery and to give the FDA a pretext not to approve new vaccines.

There’s are two other favored tactics that Burzynski “pioneered,” and that’s bullying. Robert Blaskiewicz documented many of the bullying tactics deployed against critics, as did I. For example, in 2011 his representative threatened a UK high school student,Rhys Morgan, who wrote a skeptical blog, with a lawsuit to silence him. Around the same time, other skeptical bloggers, including Andy Lewis, Peter Bowditch, Popehat, and others also received pseudolegal threats from the Clinic’s representative. The second tactic was the use of video and social media to promote stories of “miracle” cures of cancers, in particular two movies that portrayed him as a persecuted doctor who was curing cancer despite the best efforts of The Man to stop him, the first of which was responsible for attracting many desperate patients to the Burzynski Clinic in Houston, with the second movie buffing up Burzynski’s heroic image while also serving as an attack on “The Skeptics.” I assume that this all sounds familiar. Indeed, Burzynski took it even further, cultivating relationships with tabloid press, which touted “miracle cure” stories breathlessly and, in the UK, used them to attack the NHS for refusing to pay for antineoplastons for cancer patients, which had the further effect of publicizing crowdfunding efforts by Burzynski patients to afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars that his treatment could rapidly end up costing.

Seriously, there was no end to this man’s perfidy with respect to treating cancer patients, tactics emulated by legions of MAHA quacks, many of whom are now in charge of the federal public health, medical, and biomedical research establishment.

Unfortunately, MAHA owes a debt to Burzynski

Bringing it all together, it is clear that Burzynski was MAHA before there was MAHA. Indeed, he “pioneered” a lot of the tactics and rhetoric used by MAHA, including weaponizing patients, cozying up with legislators, perverting the clinical trial process, attacking critics on social media, and producing conspiracy-laden hagiographies that portrayed him as a persecuted brave maverick who’s curing cancer but being unfairly attacked by skeptics, the FDA, big pharma, and the law. To top it off, something I forgot to mention above is that he also was among the first quacks to use repurposed medical therapies. Indeed, around 13 years ago, he was promoting, in addition to his antineoplastons, “gene-targeted” therapy as if he had invented the concept of genomic medicine, an “innovation” that MAHA stans and quacks have taken as an example in their use of “repurposed drugs” and other dubious cocktails used to treat everything from COVID-19 to autism to cancer to the common cold. Basically, Burzynski learned to hop on the latest promising modality for cancer, adopt and pervert it, and then charge huge sums of money for it, in addition to his antineoplastons. Most recently, it’s immunotherapy.

Here’s the funny thing. At 83, even though he’s still quacking away, we hardly hear anything about Burzynski. At least, I don’t. The last time I wrote about him was in 2023, when I noted that his clinic was still operational and that he was still preying on desperate cancer patients. Looking at his clinic website now, what I see is a rebranding in which antineoplastons are deemphasized and various twisted versions of “personalized medicine” are front and center. Yes, he now offers a “bespoke, patient-centered” concierge approach, because that’s where the money is now. Just for yucks, I did multiple Google searches for information on Burzynski that is less than a couple of years old and found little. His clinic still exists, and, I must presume, continues to charge tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for his “bespoke” treatments (nearly all of which include antineoplastons).

It’s rather funny. As I said before, you’d think that Burzynski, who has a five decade history of recognizing trends in medical pseudoscience that will benefit him and then jumping on the wave at the right time, seems not to have gone MAHA, something that I would have expected him to do. The further irony is that, even though he was MAHA before there was MAHA, Burzynski seems not to be recognized as the pioneer in MAHA-style quackery that he truly is. As he enters the twilight of his life, I have to wonder if that burns him, or if he’s just happy to keep quacking, keep representing himself as the brave maverick that The Man couldn’t shut down, and, above all, to keep profiting.

Maybe it doesn’t matter to him, as long as MAHA cranks are in charge and leave him alone to continue his half century of grift until he can’t grift any more.

Author

David Gorski

Dr. Gorski's full information can be found here, along with information for patients.

David H. Gorski, MD, PhD, FACS is a surgical oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute specializing in breast cancer surgery, where he also serves as the American College of Surgeons Committee on Cancer Liaison Physician as well as an Associate Professor of Surgery and member of the faculty of the Graduate Program in Cancer Biology at Wayne State University. If you are a potential patient and found this page through a Google search, please check out Dr. Gorski's biographical information, disclaimers regarding his writings, and notice to patients here.

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Cancer, Health Fraud, Science and Medicine

Tagged in:

antineoplastons, Burzynski Clinic, cancer, cancer quackery, COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccine, Jay Bhattacharya, MAHA, make America healthy again, Podcast Jay, quackery, Richard Jaffe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Stanislaw Burzynski

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