"A statement of fact cannot be insolent." The miscellaneous ramblings of a surgeon/scientist on medicine, quackery, science, and pseudoscience (and anything else that interests him).

Category: Popular culture

Crowdfunding to pay to be a research subject in a clinical trial: The case of Lily Wythe [UPDATED 1/23/2020—see addendum]

Post author By Orac
Post date January 22, 2020
40 Comments on Crowdfunding to pay to be a research subject in a clinical trial: The case of Lily Wythe [UPDATED 1/23/2020—see addendum]

Lily Wythe and pay-to-play clinical trials

Lily Wythe is a teenaged girl with a deadly brainstem cancer whose case has made international news because of her family’s crowdfunding to get her into a clinical trial. Should investigators be allowed to fund trials this way?

Tags BrainChild, CAR-T cells, clinical trials, crowdfunding, diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, DIPG, GoFundMe, Lily Wythe, Nicholas Vitanza

Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience

Andy Serwer: Giving RFK, Jr. an unopposed platform to spread antivaccine propaganda on Yahoo! Finance

Post author By Orac
Post date January 17, 2020
167 Comments on Andy Serwer: Giving RFK, Jr. an unopposed platform to spread antivaccine propaganda on Yahoo! Finance

Andy Serwer of Yahoo! Finance interviewed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It did not go well. Serwer allowed RFK, Jr. to spew his antivax propaganda largely unquestioned.