 Welcome to The Randy Show, I am Brian Thompson and with me as always is James Randy. Randy, how you doing? I'm doing very well, thank you. It's a good day for me. It's nice and sunny outside and the swimming pool is beckoning. Oh, nice. The swimming pool is beckoning. It's what, it's the beginning of January. Yes, it's difficult to see but I can see it from here. Do your little thing like this. Yeah, I feel like it's a good time to go swimming in the winter because you avoid the crowds. Yeah, well, I've been to Florida, remember? We don't have winter. Oh, right, right, right. We've heard of it. It's a different attitude, I believe. Well, we've got some serious issues to deal with today. Unfortunately, there is a doctor in Texas who's offering some experimental cancer treatment that we suspect may not be entirely on the up and up. And towards the end of this episode, we'll talk more about that, man. But first, I wanted to talk to you about your experience going through cancer treatment and about your experience as a skeptic and some of the people that you've encountered who prey upon those people who have cancer and might be looking for some sort of miracle cure that doesn't actually work. I had colon cancer and it had spread to other parts of my body as well at Lemp plant. And the first scan was not satisfactory at all. It showed that it was present in seven or eight different spots of my body. But they just gave me the chemotherapy treatment, which really means that they inject you with really deadly chemicals, one of which I turned out to be allergic to and they had to discontinue it, but they substituted other varieties of it. This is really deadly to cancer cells and doesn't do the rest of you any good either. It took me six months. Pardon me. I believe that was only three months. I'm sorry. Only three months of cancer therapy, that of chemotherapy. And there was no radiation involved in my treatment. It was just simply chemotherapy. I would go in every two weeks and have a bag over my shoulder and it would be feeding a little tube right here. It's embedded in my chest. I don't want to show you all the details. And that would work. It would take two days for it to be thoroughly invested in my body. Then I'd go back two weeks after that and get a second dose of it, a second intake of it. And frankly, Brian, I didn't have any problem whatsoever with this. The little poke I got in the chest every two weeks was nothing. It was a little tiny needle about so big. They call it a butterfly needle because they say it's used to vaccinate butterflies, which is a blatant lie. They don't do that for butterflies, you see. But if you had to vaccinate a butterfly, it would be small enough for that. And that's simply injected into the port that I have in my chest here. And it goes directly into my bloodstream and it's pretty damn good. I mean, medical science is really remarkable. Not perfect. Oh, no. Not perfect. And they never claim that it's perfect. But they do say they have quite adequate treatment for the kind of thing that I had. First of all, I had a bit of my intestine looped and pulled out of my body through three incisions in my body. And I know, pardon me, two incisions in my body. One for a camera and the other one for the actual instrument. And that consisted of a loop of glass fiber. And they had already been into my colon, pardon these details, but they had inspected it visually and found out that I had two spots in there and they marked them with a black dye. And then all they did was go in afterwards and look around the colon and find the black dye and loop it out of my body like a loop like this and then snip it off with the two little cancer things there and sew it together and tuck it back into my body. I was unconscious for all of this. Of course, I suspect that they honed or sang tunes or something like that or exchanged jokes. Not at my expense, I would hope because I'm helpless on the table, you see. But they did do this. They tucked it back and I now have a basic problem. I think I've described it on one of our podcasts before that when I go to contemplate my navel, which one to contemplate because I got three of them out, you see. The real one and then the camera one and then the instrument one. But I'm not complaining. I give each of the three little dimples on my tummy. I give them all this efficient amount of attention. Yeah, three times the fun. Well, it takes your attention. It takes more time out of your day to speak to each one of them. But I'm figuring I will get a tattoo or something on it with a little arrow point. Well, there are a lot of people, though, who have it far worse than that, who go through some pretty rigorous and debilitating cancer treatments as you're well aware. I think as most people are well aware. I think most people, if they haven't gone through it themselves, they know somebody who has gone through that sort of thing. Most people do. Most people do. Whenever I tell anybody about it or they ask about it or anything, I'm able to give them quite a elaborate rundown if they really want one. But I had a very easy time of it. I must admit that it would have cost me a fortune had I had to pay for it. But again, my medical insurance is quite sufficient to cover it. And the beautiful thing is that the day that I checked in for my first chemical treatment, they released a new substance, a new pharmaceutical called E-Mend, E-M-E-N-D. And it's very expensive, $320 a tablet. I think it was, and I had to take three of them each time I went in for the infusion every two weeks. But again, I didn't have to pay full price for that, just a very small fee. But most people, this is what angers me now and concerns me. Most people in that ward where I was being infused were little old ladies and some little old men like me. And they could not afford the E-Mend. And I could. And that's not right. They had to go through the nausea that accompanies chemotherapy. And I had to help some of them through it. And I sat around and I wiped there for many hours every week while I was doing the chemo thing. Just to sit with little old ladies and tell them jokes and maybe do a couple of corny magic tricks for them. But just to hold their hands and say hello to them. Every time I'd leave, I'd hear a little lady lean over to there and say, Who is that man with the white beard? He couldn't quite figure me out, which is all well and good. But I got a great deal of, yes, I can say it. I got a great deal of joy out of it and satisfaction knowing that I had perhaps added to the elevated spirit of the cancer ward there. And then maybe I'd help these people to withstand the discomfort and the nausea that they suffered. And these were little old ladies who came by taxi and then called for a taxi again after the two-hour infusion. It was finished and went back by taxi. People who had nothing, nobody to support them. And I had, everybody I could imagine, I lined up outside the hospital and people wanted to help me do something or other. And I didn't need their help and I thanked them very much for it. But I was well looked after, not only by the hospital and my friends and such, but by the whole medical system. And if anyone is going in for chemotherapy, listen to me carefully. It is a good way to get your treatment. What sort of experience do you have with people who try to prey on cancer victims with pseudoscience, with miracle cures, with alternative medicines, that kind of thing? It's over and there's all kinds of it. It's out there all over the place. And I don't think we get quite the time or the opportunity to put it on Swift as often as we should. But my next book, A Magician in the Laboratory, is going to have extensive sections on that. And I'm going to take the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, to task for some of the things where they have lacked cooperation with the public. And they have, they've fallen short, fallen very short in my estimation of their duties. And they are given billions of dollars every year, billions of dollars, a lot of which is total wasted money. And I'm very angry about that whole thing and very disturbed over it. And when my book, A Magician in the Laboratory comes out, our listeners will have the chance to see my account of that. I'm very disturbed by it. I'm very angry. And the NIH has to answer a lot of questions. Well, let's get to what I mentioned before. There's a doctor in Houston named Stanislaw Brzynski, which I'm sure you've heard of him before. Yes. He runs a clinic that is, it's called the Brzynski Clinic. What he's been doing is a clinical trial, a series of clinical trials on cancer patients. And this procedure costs thousands of dollars. It's $30,000, basically, just to be seen at the Brzynski Clinic. And going through the whole treatment can cost upwards of $100,000. And if you want to find out all about this, you can go to thehustoncancerquack.com, which is about Stanislaw Brzynski. And hopefully, we can get these people to publish the results, or if they don't have any results to stop preying on victims of cancer. Well, I suspect that they don't have any positive results. And I suspect that they don't have any results at all. And I think this is a racket. This is an opinion. I'm not a medical person, so I can't tell you definitively, not at all. But what I've shared with some other doctors, people who are very sufficiently advanced in medical science that they should know, is that they share my opinion of it. And I think I'm particularly disturbed by the fact that you mentioned children. And this is a weakness I have. I'm not proud of any of my weaknesses I have many. One of them is that any suffering child, and I mean any distressed child crying or not crying, any child that is suffering from fear or uncertainty or anxiety or pain or anything that is a genuine reason for a child to be distressed, that gets to me immediately. And when I think of the children that have gone through this clinic and subsequently died, I'm very disturbed by that. And I feel powerless. I really do feel powerless. And something should be done, but it should be publicized. This small effort that we're doing right now to publicize this kind of thing is, I'm sure, appreciated by many persons who see the value of what we're doing. But the JRF can only do so much. And again, my next book, my 10th Magician of the Laboratory will be handling a lot of this sort of thing. And I hope it makes a big fuss, a really big fuss. I'm speaking very much from the shoulder. I'm saying it the way I believe it. It can be understood by everyone. There's no fancy language in the book at all. So when it comes out and we'll be giving adequate notice of that fact, when it comes out, I think we're going to have a lot to say about this particular cancer clinics and others who are not producing any results that they have published. And this is, in my estimation, this is my opinion now, it is a criminal action for these people to do this kind of thing and to make such huge amounts of my... I'm very dismayed by it. Thanks, Randy. Thank you very much, Brian. See you again very soon, I hope. The Randy Show is a production of the James Randy Educational Foundation. To learn more about how we promote science and critical thinking, go to Randy.org.