Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Computers and social media Medicine

Harassment: The price of defending science-based medicine

Harassment by cranks and antivaxxers is all too often the price of defending science-based medicine. Is it worth it? How can we stop it?

Categories
Clinical trials Computers and social media Medicine 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]

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?

Categories
Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery

GoFundMe and the problem of crowdfunding for quackery

GoFundMe is frequently used by patients to pay for quackery. How can its policies be changed to make misuse of the platform more difficult?

Categories
Bioethics Clinical trials Medicine

Libella Gene Therapeutics: Charging $1 million to participate in a phase 1 trial of anti-aging gene therapy

Libella Gene Therapeutics, LLC made the news last week for announcing a “pay-to-play” trial of its telomerase-based anti-aging gene therapy. What was shocking about the announcement was not that it was a “pay-to-play” trial, given that such trials have become all too common, but rather the price of enrollment: $1 million. Worse, the trial is being conducted in Colombia; the therapy doesn’t have the greatest preclinical justification; and it’s a phase 1 trial, which means it is only trial of safety, not efficacy. How can unethical and scientifically dubious trials like this be stopped?

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery

Clínica 0-19 and IDOI: Not making DIPG history in Monterrey, part 5, IDOI-1

Drs. Alberto Siller and Alberto Garcia are at it again at Clínica 0-19, peddling a dubious case series touting their DIPG treatment. Let’s just say that it does not demonstrate that their treatment is better than existing treatments; i.e., not very good.