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.
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:
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.
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