[Finny]

Perhaps, but I'll say one thing: the extremely sloppy writing exhibited in "The Med Guru" piece indicates someone whose credibility SHOULD be considered highly questionable. If The Med Guru is so ignorant of the English language yet still presumes to "educate" through writing with pieces like this, it illustrates certain qualities of The Med Guru.

When talking about posts such as those here on FR or any other online forum written by regular Joes and Janes, typos and mispelling and grammatical errors pretty much deserve a universal pass because this is a strictly amateur/hobby forum. But when an ostensibly "professional" source is so cavalier as to (wittingly or unwittingly) spit in the face of correct English as much as this Med Guru, it tells me that the source is either woefully ignorant or extremely arrogant, or most likely both. That's not to say that the info he presents is correct or wrong, but it IS to say that readers should understand something about the mindset of where that info is coming from.

[exDemMom]

Perhaps, but I'll say one thing: the extremely sloppy writing exhibited in "The Med Guru" piece indicates someone whose credibility SHOULD be considered highly questionable. If The Med Guru is so ignorant of the English language yet still presumes to "educate" through writing with pieces like this, it illustrates certain qualities of The Med Guru.

The "Med Guru" could also be a victim of "editoritis." I know several people who are not very careful with their writing because they know that it will go to an editor before it is published, and the editor will fix all the errors. However, in this blog, even though there is no editor to fix the mistakes, the writer still seems to have the attitude that his sloppy writing will be repaired. Personally, I take pride in sending pieces to the editors that do *not* need to be corrected before publication, and I try to catch errors before I hit "post" here on FR.

The information presented here is correct. The six year old child died of hypernatremia--an abnormally high concentration of salt in the blood, caused by Quack Burzynski's "antineoplastons." Burzynski has a long history of defrauding patients and their families by claiming that he can cure them when they have no real options and are desperate. The FDA investigation after this case turned up a boatload of damning evidence--for instance, Burzynski did not keep treatment records, and his IRB was filled with cronies who were hardly independent in their reviews of his trial protocols. Furthermore, despite over 20 years of phase II trials, he never published results, and never advanced to phase III trials (which he would have done were this a serious clinical trial, and not a method to defraud patients).

In real clinical trials, patients are reimbursed for their time and expenses. On the contrary, Burzynski charged thousands of dollars to participate in his sham trials.