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May 19, 2011 01:08 pm PDT
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/1q4SeUZdxQg/there-is-no-miracle.html
There is no miracle cure for cancer
Or: Maybe Facebook isn't the best source for science and health news. An interesting debunking. You know the game, Telephone? You line up a bunch of people and the person on one end whispers something to their neighbor, who repeats it to the next person in line, and so on. At the other end, the last player says the secret out loud, and then everybody gets a nice chuckle from how distorted the secret has become as it was passed along the line. I rather like Telephone the game. But, lord, how I hate when it happens in real life. So, this week on the Internet, there's a story circulating that claims scientists have discovered a foolproof, side-effect free cure for cancer ... but They (you know, "THEY") are preventing you from getting access to it. This story is like the end of a game of Telephone. There's some real (and interesting!) science going on, but by the time the story made it to Facebook the reality of a promising chemical compound that could be a good treatment for some types of cancer (maybe, scientists aren't sure yet) had become a first-rate conspiracy theory. The compound in question is dichloroacetate (or DCA), and it's not really anything new. In fact, research into this compound has been going on long enough—and with enough attention from within the field of people who closely follow basic, laboratory chemical research—that I could almost do this entire debunking using only excerpts from four-year-old posts made by Orac, a surgeon and scientist who blogs about this kind of stuff in a much more specialized way than I do....
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/1q4SeUZdxQg/there-is-no-miracle.html
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