Following Keir Liddle’s latest post, which suggested Wayne Dolcefino has been employed by the Burzynski Clinic, the East England Skeptical Society contacted Dolcefino to try to get some firm answers.
His name may not be familiar here in the UK, but Dolcefino is well known in Houston for his work with KTRK TV, where he exposed public corruption and cover ups.
His site boasts that
He knows how to dig…and what to dig for
And since Dolcefino advertises services such as Crisis Management using the tagline “Credibility when you need it most”, I think it entirely understandable that Burzynski bloggers like Keir and I might jump to conclusions.
We suspected that perhaps Dolcefino has been hired by Burzynski to restore credibility in the brand, partly by digging dirt on bloggers. And if the FDA have really stopped Burzynski from giving his signature treatment to new patients (as was suggested on a recent patient blog), then it is also understandable to think that the Clinic may have felt in need of Crisis Management.
So, were our suspicions correct? Has Dolcefino confirmed his role as Burzynski’s PR guy?
Here are the main highlights of the conversation, taken from the East England Skeptical Society’s SKEPT!CAL blog (here):
1. He has worked for the clinic. Speaking to patients in person and on the phone. He’s also made some videos of these interviews for the clinic.
2. He confirmed that the FDA are at the clinic. He says this is standard procedure when a trial ends.
3. That the trials have ended.
4. The clinic are getting ready to publish.
5. He has heard of the Merritts and if asked to, he would speak to them. When I asked him about their requested refund, he said he’d read about it and that “refunds were a funny thing”. He didn’t say if he’d already been in contact with them.
6. Despite saying he would speak to the Merritts if asked, he didn’t work for the clinic at the moment.
7. He was aware of Marc Stephens past behaviour. He said, “he didn’t muddy the water, he peed in it”. He went on to say, if asked to speak to bloggers, he would do so in a polite and respectful manner.
8. When I asked him about the legitimate questions that Burzyński needed to answer, he said that the cost and trial data were legitimate questions.
Incidentally, the Merritts are Wayne (a former patient) and Lisa, who have written a blog highly critical of the Burzynski Clinic and were subsequently threatened by Marc Stephens, a former representative of Burzynski.
Dolcefino confirmed that he has worked for the clinic but it doesn’t seem clear in what capacity, or if he is working for them at the moment. He is at least close enough to Burzynski to realise that the FDA are currently investigating the clinic and even seemed to confirm that trials on antineoplastons have ended.
But Dolcefino must be mistaken if he believes that we are soon to see meaningful data from those trials. As we have pointed out time and time again, Burzynski has been using antineoplastons for over thirty-five years and has never published a single paper in a respectable peer reviewed journal.
Josephine Jones 
Perhaps the FDA finally told “Old Stan” to put up or shut up – no more trials until he publishes the data he has……we’ll see.
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Perhaps Burzynski wanted to wait until “all” clinical trials re A10 and AS2-1 were complete before publishing the final results
Burzynski has been using antineoplastons since the 1970s and since the late 90s, has had to use them within FDA approved clinical trials. That is an awful long time to carry on using an experimental therapy. It is also remarkable and shocking that patients have had to pay thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of participating in trials.
It is not how medical research works. You don’t use something for thirty odd years before publishing data.
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