Burzynski Patient Douglas W.’s Story
As Stanislaw Burzynski heads to court again to answer charges made by the Texas Medical Board on behalf of a variety of patients, he is doubtlessly preparing by getting the testimony of current and former patients. In anticipation of this pony’s one trick, we are going to start telling the stories of patients who have testified on Burzynski’s behalf over the course of his long, dubious career and see where they are now.
Douglas W. was a Burzynski superstar. He was a helicopter crew chief in Vietnam and then became a corporate jet pilot. On June 26, 1994, according to a March 6, 1996 report in The Oregonian, Douglas received a bad diagnosis. He had a brain tumor, a glioblastoma. According to the report:
[Douglas’s] life gave way to surgery, 33 radiation treatments and four months of conventional chemotherapy. The worst still was to come.
In January 1995, [Douglas] and his wife, Lola, heard bad news from their oncologist: The tumor still was growing. The doctor told [Douglas] he had three or four months to live.
At this point, Douglas turned to the Burzynski Clinic and went on antineoplaston treatment. It was not cheap:
In the past year, his quest for life has taken him close to the center of a national medical controversy. He’s spent $75,000 traveling to Texas and paying for chemotherapy that his insurance wouldn’t cover.
Antineoplastons are the almost certainly ineffective chemotherapy that cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski has kept “experimental” for 4 decades. Though the experiments have led to no reputable publications, he sure has managed to charge hundreds of patients top dollar for the drug derived initially from human urine and blood. Essentially, Burzynski posits that cancer is caused by a lack of “antineoplastons” in the blood, that cancer is basically an antineoplaston deficiency syndrome. No other physician on the planet recognizes this as a cause of cancer, and no competent physician says there is evidence of this alternative immune system that is supposed to take care of cancer.
Regardless, the reason why Douglas is a superstar is revealed in the next few paragraphs of the article:
Eleven months after he started a chemotherapy unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration, [Douglas] is in full remission. […]
Last week, [Douglas] testified before a congressional subcommittee investigating the Food and Drug Administration’s obligation to patients with life threatening illnesses. He appeared on “Nightline” with Ted Koppel in defense of Stanislaw R. Burzynski, a Texas doctor who has been giving unorthodox chemotherapy to cancer patients.
In fact, according to the transcript of the May 19, 1995 Nightline episode, Douglas was used as an example of “desperation”:
DAVE MARASH, ABC News: [voice-over] The first thing you feel in the waiting room of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s Houston, Texas cancer clinic is the desperation.
DOUG [W.] My name is Doug [W.], and I’m from Estekay [sp?], Oregon, which is southeast of Portland, and I’ve got a- I don’t know what it is, but it’s a brain-
WIFE: It’s a glio- it’s a glioblastoma.
DOUG [W.] : -glioblastoma, stage IV.
Back to the Oregonian article, where we see some surprising endorsements:
[Douglas] is in the spotlight because his tumor, an aggressive, advanced stage of glioblastoma, no longer makes a blip on a brain scan. His remission amazed his doctors in Portland.
Dr. Gerald L. Warnock, a diagnostic radiologist with the East Portland Imaging Center, has evaluated four or five of [Douglas’s] brain scans in the past year. He said the most recent scan, in January, was totally clear of a tumor.
“I have never seen it happen before,” said Warnock, who has evaluated about 50 patients with brain tumors.
He said [Douglass’s] remission could be a delayed reaction to his conventional treatments, a miracle, or the result of antineoplaston, the drug administered by Burzynski.
Warnock said he is skeptical of unconventional treatments.
“One case doesn’t make a doctor a hero,” he said.
Still, Warnock is impressed with [Douglas’s] remission, because he’s seen his brain scans, both before and after antineoplaston.
“If I had a relative with that particular type of tumor, I think I would send him down there,” he said.
Dr. Bruce Dana, a medical oncologist who treated [Douglas] with FDA approved anticancer drugs, also is impressed with [Douglas’s] remission. He said he has never seen a glioblastoma disappear after earlier scans showed it growing.
By any measure, these doctors are being irresponsible. Going to the press with a data set of one person is irresponsible, especially when the stakes are so high, namely a treatment for an intractable tumor. This is not the last time we’ll hear from Dr. Warnock, however.
Of course, we have seen too much weirdness with Burzynski’s charts in the past (we’re thinking of the time that the FDA got two different sets of records, one from Burzynski’s IRB and a different one from the Clinic, about a child whose death sparked a federal investigation–whoops!) for us to accept the interpretations of anyone who has received records from the Clinic. This is a major reason that the definitive study of ANP can’t possibly come from Burzynski’s outfit. They have shown themselves endlessly incapable of maintaining charts and running clinical trials.
Douglas was out among the 75 patients protesting outside the courthouse as Burzynski faced federal charges in February 1996:
Doug [W], a patient of Burzynski’s, expressed hope that Lake will allow continued treatment. After being on the unorthodox treatments since last summer, [Douglas] said his brain cancer has disappeared.
“I had done everything my doctors in Portland told me to do and then after 33 treatments of chemotherapy and radiation, they told me to give up hope. They said I only had two to three months to live. But I wasn’t ready to give up hope. That’s why I came here.”
On the 29th of February, Douglas was in Washington, D.C. and had five minutes in front of a House committee as patients were paraded in front of congressmen and cameras to beg for their lives.
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And here’s why Burzynski and his legal team use patients as human shields. Because patients channel their whole being, their entire hope into the campaign to keep their doctor, who they are allowed to believe is the only thing keeping them alive.
The next time Douglas appears in the media, it’s in the Peoria Journal Star on 5 July 1996, which opened:
Just months after Douglas [W.] went on national television and before Congress to praise an unproven drug for obliterating his brain tumor, he got a shock: The cancer was back.
[Douglas’s] trauma illustrates the contention swirling over “antineoplastons. ” Are they the wonder drugs that desperate patients insist? Or are patients the victims of a fraud charged in a federal indictment of the drugs’ creator, Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski? “There is a long history of promises of miraculous treatments, and they unfortunately generally don’t pan out,” said Dr. Richard Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute.
[…]
[Douglas] even stands by Burzynski, abandoning antineoplastons only when his brain tumor tripled in size. “We believe that treatment did work with Doug for a year,” said his wife, Lola [W], of Estacada, Ore.
It is sad, but entirely to be expected, to see that Douglas supported Burzynski after a clear failure. They believe the treatment works, but from the outside it is impossible to distinguish between a tumor growing steadily but slowly for a year and a tumor growing like crazy only in the last weeks. This is why we need trials. This is why patient testimonials are veridically worthless.
And we’re not the only ones who question the value of Burzynski’s treatment. Dr. Warnock, the radiologist who said that it looked like he would consider sending a family member to the Clinic after he saw Douglas’s scans, has had a come-to-Jesus moment:
The biggest question is how patients fare over the long term.
Take [Douglas], whose brain scans showed in January that his tumor was gone. In April, it was back. Triple antineoplaston doses failed.
[Douglas’s] doctor cannot explain the initial disappearance. But the relapse and a second patient who had “a flagrant progression of the tumor in 60 days” make him “extremely skeptical,” said Dr. Gerald Warnock.
We suspect Warnock has learned to not speculate wildly in public and that’s why he doesn’t explain the initial disappearance. Doctors and other medical professionals who work with Burzynski’s patients have reported being stung when they see what giving him the benefit of the doubt leads to. Take Dr. Bennett, who treated a girl in New Hampshire earlier this year:
Bennett’s decision [to treat the girl] was based, in part, on a newspaper article that said Burzynski had agreed to donate the medicine required for [ML’s] treatment. But what Bennett didn’t know is that Burzynki planned to charge the family for the clinical costs associated with the therapy.
[ML’s grandfather] said the first month’s bill is expected to be $28,000. Every month after that is expected to cost $16,000. The treatment usually lasts eight to 12 months.
Bennett says a representative of the Burzynski Clinic called him on that date seeking payment for the first month of [ML’s] therapy. Prior to that, Bennett, who is donating his services, thought Burzynski was doing the same.
Instead, said Bennett, “I’m supposed to be the bag man for all of this. They want me to collect the 30 grand for the family and send it to Burzynski.”
Elsewhere, Bennett said that the arrangement “meets all the criteria for a bait and switch operation.” And still elsewhere, he said:
“This is a classic bait-and-switch operation,” Bennett said of Burzynski in a recent phone interview. “He suckered me and this family into buying into a very expensive treatment plan.”
[…]
Bennett has become dismissive of Burzynski’s alleged treatment.
“His claims have no merit. He has never tested any of it realistically,” said Bennett.
And the IV-certified nurse who visited the Burzynski Clinic was apparently not impressed either:
Bennett noted as an example training for Ariel Dye, a registered nurse from Derry who oversaw the intravenous injections of [ML], which cost many thousands of dollars but provided nothing of value. Neither Bennett nor Dye were paid for their help.
“I went out there and watched the nurse teach a layperson how to work off a central line. It was nothing,” said Dye, who is an IV-certified RN. “It was crazy to me that they charged this.”
“I got little to no instruction saying (things like) if there are major reactions, this is what you’re going to do in this case, in that case,” she said. “They made it seem like it was this big training program they put me through, but they lied and were looking to make money.”
Nonetheless, in the same article, and despite the fact that ML reportedly had a bad reaction to the drugs, her grandfather still supports Burzynski:
But [ML’s grandfather] thinks Burzynski has shown at least anecdotally that his treatment has more promise than anything developed by mainstream medicine.
“If he had more funding, he could come up with answers, but nobody wants to do trials with him,” said [ML’s grandfather], who blames Burzynksi’s patent for the opposition. “Because one individual has controlling interest over this, they can’t make any money from this man.”
[ML’s grandfather] also thinks that if the FDA had allowed [her] to be treated at Burzynski’s clinic in Texas, rather than requiring it to be done in New Hampshire under the oversight of a local doctor, she might have done better.
“I don’t believe any of that nay-saying stuff. I’m not going into this blindly,” said [ML’s grandfather], talking about the months of reading and work and meetings he has held on the topic. If somebody else he knew was diagnosed with DIPG, he’d recommend going to Burzynski.
Even though knowledgeable professionals who have nothing to gain from seeing Burzynski shot down and who clearly want to help cancer patients in any way they can, once they have actually worked with Burzynski very commonly come out entirely disillusioned, the targets of Burzynski’s scheme, the fundraisers and family’s and patients, often cling harder to the Clinic, because the alternative is perhaps too horrible for the healthy mind to contemplate.
According to Douglas W.’s obituary in the Sept 8, 1996 Oregonian, Douglas died on the 6th of September, mere months after he appeared before Congress as an apparent cure to testify for Burzynski. He was 48.
For the stories of other patients who have testified for Burzynski but subsequently died, see the cases of Elke B. and Janet C.
The OTHER Burzynski Patient Group 