Hal from Scarborough, Western Australia, Australia asked:

Is Antineoplaston therapy a new and effective treatment?

Is Antineoplaston therapy a new and effective treatment?

Is this treatment worth trying? Does it work for pancreatic cancer?

The source:
Our answer

There is no evidence showing that antineoplaston therapy is an effective treatment for cancer. The so-called therapy has been developed by Stanislaw Burzynski. It involves chemicals called antineoplastons that are normally found in urine and blood and allegedly can correct the development of abnormal cells, like those in cancers. However, there is no solid evidence that these chemicals actually work in treating cancer. Burzynski has reported several anecdotal cases where the antineoplastons apparently helped people with cancer. But many of these people also received other treatments, so it’s not clear that any improvement was due to the antineoplastins. Of more importance, no other laboratories have managed to reproduce his results. Most importantly, Burzynski has failed to show that his treatment works in a randomised control trial – where volunteers are randomly given either the treatment, or a placebo. This is the best way of working out if a new treatment is actually effective against cancer. Despite this lack of evidence, some people with cancer have been asked to pay tens of thousands of dollars to try out a treatment that has not been adequately shown to work.

This page was last updated on: March 7, 2013

Similar things people heard