From Chapter 1: (Click for PDF)

We Have Some Fun
Wachsman called two experts. The first was from Harvard’s physics department. His job was to establish that selenium was a dangerous chemical. I think they called him because he worked at Harvard. He was not a medical doctor, let alone an oncologist, and he didn’t seem to know much about selenium. I thought about trying to strike him as a witness or challenge his credentials, but instead, I decided to have some fun with him.

We did some medical research and pulled up every article about selenium published in the past twenty years, and every article about a couple of other medications. Those were the days of dot-matrix, continuous-feed printer paper. When we printed up the lists of articles, it was a lot of pages, maybe fifty or a hundred pages of just the names and citations of the scientific articles (and some other lists).

So on cross, I just started reading the names of the articles and where they were published (and most were published in reputable journals, at least as far as I and the jury knew). One by one I read them.

In order to discuss an article with an expert, you have to first ask the expert if he is familiar with the article. If he says he is, you can ask him questions about the article. But if he isn’t, you can’t ask him about the article. This Harvard professor was not familiar with the first article on selenium, so I moved to the second. Nope, he didn’t know that one either. I went down my list, quoting the title of each article about selenium and where it was published. He was not familiar with a single one of them.

All of these articles had titles like “The Use of Selenium to Prevent and Treat Tumors.” So he didn’t look so much like an expert on selenium since he had not heard of any of these articles. And the jury was hearing about all these wonderful articles about the magical anti-cancer properties of selenium.

After going through about a dozen such articles, the jury was seeing me appear to get frustrated, since I was not able to discuss any of these articles with him. Actually, I was hoping he had not read any of the articles, because that made two of us. I hadn’t read a single one of them either. All I had were the names of the articles.

I then asked the judge for a moment to look through all the pages of the articles. At that point the fifty attached pages somehow started to unfold and fall to the floor like an expanding accordion, page after attached page. I clumsily tried to stop the pages from unraveling. (The clumsy part was no act.) I eventually retrieved all the attached papers from the floor, but it took some time, as I was having some trouble putting them back together. All this time, everyone was waiting for me to continue. As I finished putting the pages back together, I told the judge I had no further questions. I think the point was made.

From Chapter 2: (Click for PDF)

“Aspirin Is a Very Dangerous Drug”
A major part of the government’s case was the interstate shipment of medicine. The government brought in a senior FDA employee. His job was to explain the FDA drug approval process, its necessity, and how the FDA regulates interstate commerce.

I caught a break with him on cross-examination. I made some reference to the fact that not every drug is as benign as aspirin. It was just an offhand comment. But the FDA witness corrected me and said that aspirin was a very dangerous drug. I looked at him in astonishment. And I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. Before he could stop himself, Judge Lake turned to the witness and said, “You mean taking a child’s dose of aspirin every day is dangerous?” Everyone in the courtroom knew that Lake was taking aspirin, just like many of us were.

The FDA witness turned to the judge, looked him dead in the eye, and said, “Yes, it is.” And then he said something even more remarkable. He said that if aspirin was up for drug approval now, the FDA would never approve it. He said aspirin was just too dangerous and there are too many other, better things out there to treat headache pain and aches. Lake was speechless.

Sensing a moment here, I raised my arms in an overly dramatic gesture and said half seriously, “Your Honor, I rest my case.” Everyone in the courtroom laughed, and I think the point was made.

There were a number of humorous moments during the prosecutor’s direct case. However, these guys were deadly serious about putting Burzynski in jail, and they were presenting a competent and persuasive case.

From Chapter 6: (Click for PDF)

Even Homer Simpson Becomes a Chiropractor
The medical establishment has two big problems with chiropractic. First, it does not think there is any hard science behind the subluxation theory as the cause of disease. Maybe not, but there are hundreds of articles in the best sense of “evidence-based medicine” and “controlled trials” that demonstrate the effectiveness of chiropractic on soft tissue (i.e., muscle and ligament) injury. In my opinion, chiropractic has much more science and better results than a wide range of medical interventions like the laminectomies and fusions performed by back surgeons.39 There is a double standard here, as the majority of medical therapeutics is not supported by controlled clinical trials which are the gold standard of medical science. (See Chapter 8 for more about this.)

But the bigger complaint the medical and especially the insurance establishment has against chiropractors is over treatment. This idea has even made it into pop culture. There is an episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to a chiropractor who tells Homer he has to come for treatment three times a week for the rest of his life. Over the years, the insurance industry and the federal government have come up with a variety of approaches to stop the alleged over treatment of patients by chiropractors.