Burzynski Patient Pam D.’s Story

This is a very, very brief story, but it shows how physicians refusing to participate in the Burzynski Clinic’s treatments may well have saved a patient’s life.

The story of Pam D. begins in May 2011, when she was diagnosed with throat cancer. By the time it had been detected, it had spread from a tonsil to a lymph node. By the time her Caring Bridge journal begins (login required), she has been to Houston and has returned without treatment:

Most of you know that I went to Texas to pursue a better, healthier treatment plan, then back home to find a doctor to support me and work with the doctors in Texas. Unfortunately as hard as I tried I was not able to find a doctor that would work with us, and now I feel I need to get started with something. I start traditional treatment sometimes this month.

She was treated while in Houston, probably with his chemo cocktail, er, “gene-targeted” therapy. This is a mixture of chemotherapies that have not been tested together based on the genetic equivalent of palm reading. Take the case of the Merritts, whose oncologist told them that the cocktail that Wayne had been prescribed might make him bleed out from the liver. So, real chemotherapy posing as transparently incompetent gene therapy. (Every so often you see the right conventional treatment in with the mix, I should add.) With this in mind, Pam wrote on Oct 12th:

Saw the radiology/oncologist yesterday after treatment for an exam. She was feeling around my neck and asked me if I felt the mass anymore. She said it was a marble size and now she can’t find it 🙂 it seems to be GONE!!! I told her and before it was a marble size it was a walnut size! I had to throw that in because it was the medications I was taking from Dr. Bruzynski that made the tumor shrink from walnut to marble size, however I had not seen her when it was larger so I am not sure she was aware of that. Nevertheless it seems to gone GONE so that’s great news.

Her last treatment was on Nov 16, 2011. By April she was found to have no visible signs of cancer (not the same thing as the result of the physical exam above–this was a PET scan). Her taste buds were sending her brain weird signals and her salivary glands were damaged, but she lived.

Doctors refusing to participate in Burzynski’s kooky chemistry experiments is the best thing that ever happened to Pam D., and she may never know it. We thank her doctors for refusing to participate in the dubious treatments.

A few important things to note:

1) Pursuing alternative medicine instead of medicine wastes time that could be spent getting proven treatments. This gives cancer a head start and leaves the patient playing catch-up. In this case, Pam does not begin a real sustained course of treatment (chemotherapy and radiation) until late September/early October, at least 3 months.

2) Doctors standing their ground and seeing to it that the people in their charge get the standard of care saves lives.

We wish Pam D. and her family the best.

For reliable information about clinical trials, visit to clinicaltrials.gov. Please contribute to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, which cares for sick children even if they can’t pay. Unlike Burzynski.