With all of the recent controversy surrounding COVID-19 vaccines, even people who previously put their full trust in regulatory agencies such as the CDC and NIH and monolithic pharmaceutical corporations (Big Pharma), have grown much more skeptical of these entities.
However, long before COVID-19, another war was being waged, this one in the cancer arena. In the 2016 documentary “Burzynski: The Cancer Cure Cover-Up” director Eric Merola details the long battle between regulatory agencies (and Big Pharma) and a trailblazing physician who developed an alternative cancer treatment.
While Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski was performing his Ph.D. research, he made a breakthrough discovery. He came across a type of peptide in human blood and urine samples that had never before been encountered in biochemical research (peptides are short chains of amino acids that link peptide bonds, as opposed to the long chains of amino acids known as proteins).
Moreover, the peptides that Burzynski discovered seemed to be much more numerous in people who were cancer-free, while those with cancer didn’t have as many of them, as indicated by their blood and urine samples. He concluded that the peptides helped prevent the growth of cancer cells.
Burzynski eventually found a way to extract the peptides from healthy donors. He pioneered a new treatment methodology that came to be known as antineoplaston therapy.
“Burzynski: The Cancer Cure Cover-Up” charts Burzynski’s decades-long struggle to acquire approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for legal clinical trials of antineoplastons.
Before he began using the experimental therapy, Burzynski’s attorneys investigated both state and federal law. They determined that he was legally able to administer his alternative cancer therapy without FDA approval because the state of Texas (where he established his clinic) didn’t require physicians to adhere to federal law in this particular situation. However, in more recent times laws have become more restrictive.
The documentary details how Burzynski’s alternative cancer therapy successfully treated cancer patients, even rendering certain patients completely cancer-free.
Naturally, the alternative cancer therapy faced a tremendous amount of skepticism from many different quarters and eventually come under fire from the FDA.
Some of the initial legal attacks Burzynski faced came from the Texas Medical Board. The board investigated him in an effort to discredit the new therapy and revoke his ability to practice medicine. That struggle took Burzynski to the Texas Supreme Court but ultimately failed to stop him from using antineoplaston therapy.
The FDA then came after Burzynski. That attack resulted in four failed federal grand juries, after jurors found him not guilty of any wrongdoing. If he had been convicted, he would have faced over 200 years in federal prison and millions of dollars in punitive fines.
Burzynski emerged from the smoke of these numerous legal battles not only unscathed but emboldened by the swelling ranks of cancer patients who had been successfully treated with antineoplaston therapy.
The film explores some possible motivations behind the government and Big Pharma’s relentless legal persecution of Burzynski. In the wake of the failed attacks, it looks at how special interest groups are waging huge propaganda campaigns against the upstart doctor and his groundbreaking therapy.
For the most part, I found this documentary to be an interesting watch. Much of the information it contains is rarely found in mainstream media. Although much of what the interviewees discuss is revelatory, the various talking heads in this film tend to have dry, monotone, and sometimes hard-to-hear deliveries.
Overall, “Burzynski: The Cancer Cure Cover-Up” is an informative documentary about an alternative cancer therapy and its trailblazing founder.
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