Consider me skeptical.
From the title, I agree that the Cancer treatment business IS a business, but that doesn't mean there's a giant conspiracy for mainstream therapies (e.g. radiation, chemo, etc).
But just visiting his website and FAQs, some things
do not pass the smell test.
They allegedly have been performing clinical trials on their antineoplastons since 1993; they ONLY list 'Phase II' trials as completed, and
I see no fully randomized Phase III results.
His FAQ lists a
SINGLE Phase II study with ONLY 10 patients. That's really really hard to take seriously.
Phase I studies are safety only studies (first, do no harm), and are on small groups of patients.
Phase II studies are small efficacy/dosage related studies and are NOT randomized.
Phase III studies are fully randomize, and are far more challenging to 'pass'. (e.g. Medtronic just had a device in development for drug-resistant high blood pressure therapy which had gone thru several Phase II successful studies; they just failed the Phase III a couple years ago, which means going back to square one).
So, at first glance, he sounds like a snake oil salesman, using this documentary as a propaganda piece to justify his therapy options.
And...just looking at a Google link now, it appears my skepticism may be well-founded...
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/stanislaw_burzynski_four_decades_of_an_unproven_cancer_cure/
After nearly forty years, it is still not entirely clear exactly what Burzynski originally isolated, but it is clear that antineoplastons almost certainly do not have significant anticancer activity. Excellent detailed summaries of the state of the evidence have been provided by Saul Green (2001; 1992) and, more recently, on the American Cancer Society (2012) and National Cancer Institute (2013a; 2013b) websites. In brief, based on his hypothesis that a naturally occurring biochemical system in the body, distinct from the immune system, could “correct” cancer cells by means of “special chemicals that reprogram misdirected cells,” Burzynski used gel filtration to separate blood and urine fractions and test them in cell culture for anticancer activity. Of his original thirty-nine fractions, today Burzynski treats patients mainly with AS-2.1 (also known as Astugenal or Fengenal) and A-10 (also known as Atengenal or Cengenal). As Saul Green (2001; 1992) and others (Antineoplaston Anomaly 1998) have reported, AS-2.1 is the sodium salt of phenylacetic acid (PA), a potentially toxic chemical produced by normal metabolism and detoxified in the liver to phenylacetylglutamine (PAG). To boil ANP chemistry down to its essence, AS-2.1 is primarily a mixture of PA and PAG, and AS-10 is primarily PA. Of note, PA had been studied as a potential anticancer agent years before Burzynski discovered it (Sandler and Close 1959) and, although it has been studied intermittently for fifty years, it has shown little promise against brain tumors (Chang et al. 1999).
Consistent with what is known, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) characterized the concentrations of ANPs required to show antitumor effects in cell culture or animal studies as “excessively high” and reflecting a “lack of activity” (NCI 2013a), concluding very generously that the evidence that ANPs have significant anticancer activity is “inconclusive.” In 1999 the Mayo Clinic published a phase 2 clinical trial of ANPs versus recurrent glioma (Buckner et al. 1999). Other investigators have had difficulty replicating Burzynski’s results, including the NCI, Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals, and the Japanese National Cancer Institute (Green 2001; 1992). The one exception is Hideaki Tsuda, a Japanese anesthesiologist at Kurume University, who claims to have observed remarkable results in a randomized clinical trial adding ANPs to chemotherapy infused directly into the hepatic artery to treat liver metastases from colorectal cancer. Indeed, Dr. Tsuda appeared in the most recent Burzynski documentary touting impressive results from this clinical trial. Unfortunately, at this writing, these results remain unpublished, and Tsuda’s previously published ANP work is not impressive. Amusingly, Eric Merola sent out a complaint on social media lamenting that the Lancet Oncologyrejected Dr. Tsuda’s manuscript, ascribing the rejection to a Big Pharma conspiracy to suppress ANPs (Gorski 2013c).
