In vitro, in vivo You stop when you're broke

I am not making up the name, nor even stealing it from a P. G. Wodehouse novel... Ignatius Massop is the real handle of a computer retailer in Rheinberg, who has diversified into Alternative Oncology, as proprietor and domain-registrant of Resurrection Clinics . These include a clinic in the Netherlands (because legal reasons) but they appear to be a German / Polish franchise of the "Saisei-Mirai" chain. Ignatius Massop also owns the complementary "Best Immunotherapy" website serving to provide consumers with wholly disinterested medical advice.



What brings all this into the purview of the Riddled mission statement, and indeed under its rubric -- if not vice versa -- is the fact that Saisei-Mirai is a chain of cancer-fraud snake-oil shops, offering an eclectic pick-&-mix buffet of mutually-Supportive Modalities, for if the first five forms of high-tech cargo cult have no effect there is always a sixth, or a seventh, as long as the cash holds out. Thus their scammocopoeia is a useful resource for oncological hipsters.

I was listening to Tumor Treating Fields (TTF) before they were cool. 

Tumor Treating Fields (TTF) or Electrical Cancer Therapy is "a type of electromagnetic field therapy using low-intensity electrical fields to suppress cancer cell proliferation in the body"... that sounds all very well, but apparently you wear a quilted vest and padded balaclava designed for bomb-disposal cosplay or Extreme Contact Calvinball, with your daily activities restricted to the length of the extension cord. With matching designer electric blanket. "The electric fields are designed to be specific for each patient after accessing scans." There's a TED-talk and everything.

This TTF patient keeps his victims alive for 

weeks in a soundproof basement "playroom"

As you are now, so once was I: blissfully naive in the ways of Alt-Med mendacity. Having read "Spoor of Spooks" and "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science", I thought myself appraised of the full taxonomy of fraudulence. But too much time spent at the Saisei-Mirai scamsite has disabused me of that notion.*

Mesotherapy (electroporation)?
Maitake MD-Fraction Extract?

Then there's Ukrain. 

The quotidian weather in Great Britain.

Perhaps. Also an allegedly cancer-curing extract of Nipplewort (Chelidonium majus), which also cures hepatitis, AIDS and radiation sickness. Ukrain's remedial value is supported by academic publications, all emanating from the Ukrainian clinic specialising in its use. Its manufacturer Vasyl Novytskyi set aside a stockpile of the concentrate, using tonnes of Nipplewort which he foraged from public parks in Vienna, which is why he is facing fraud charges for changing the dates on ampoules so that they no longer seem to have expired. Novytskyi may in fact have been trying to create a National Liqueur, for no European nation is secure in its claims to statehood until it has a hangover-treating vile-tasting mothball-infused form of alcohol that the local yoofs can shot-drink as a display and test of manhood.

What in the world is Smut Clyde drinking now?

It is refreshing to find Amygdalin, on the list of modalities, for it is of the old-school dispensation. It used to be 'Laetrile' before repudiating its slave name.

For some reason, neither the Laetrile nor the electromagical ski-jackets were mentioned when Saisei-Mirai paid Nature to publish a 5-page academic-article-shaped advertorial (in exchange for sponsoring a Special Issue on Breast Cancer). GcMAF was there, though. Lots of GcMAF. A series of Case Reports and in-vitro studies churned out from Saisei-Mirai is all that keeps the journal Anticancer Research afloat.**



And finally, E. coli Coley Vaccines.
The back-story there is tedious, but it involves a Lost Recipe, huzzah! Original recipes are always being lost; it must be a tradition, or an old charter or something. Coley's Bacteriotoxin Blend is joined in oblivion by the secret ingredient of Talmudic dark-blue tekhelet dye, lost in the Diaspora; and the Lost Chord; and the Lost Wax Method known only to sages of yore in the glory that was Lemuria.

Hunting chilazon for tekhelet dye

So Doctor Coley rejected the surgical and chemotherapeutic directions in oncology prefered by his Edwardian peers, offering instead his own combination of anecdotes and magical thinking. He did agree, though, on the need to wear a high starched collar and spats during each consultation. More recent clinical trials of Coley's Toxins have been consistently "inconclusive" (which is true in the narrow sense of "failed to support the desired conclusion"). But FAILURES DON'T COUNT, as they can be ascribed to the failure to follow Coley's correct recipe, or to use his special sauce of tailoring the toxin blend for each patient (Yay personalised therapy!!).

Still hunting chilazon

Anyway, the current popularity of Cancer Immunotherapy required someone to be anointed as Father of Immunotherapy, which motivated a series of recent papers retconning Coley into that role (recycled, with little change, as a Whackyweedia entry). This rehabilitative project was abetted by a Family Foundation, i.e. Coley's single-minded daughter, set on redressing the injustice of the obscurity he had fallen into. Further assistance came from the appalling state of Coley's records (which only the daughter was able to read), and non-publication of unresponsive cases.

If any doubt lingers as to the value of Coley's febrigenic brew -- reconstructed by the boffins at Saisei-Mirai -- here is Dr Marco Ruggiero (friend of Riddled), using his editorial privileges at the totally non-parasitic Journal of Ruggiero Studies to herald Coley as a Brave Maverick Scientist, his own harbinger as an intellectual John the Baptist. Also here and here.

[H/t Dora]

* Disabuse [vt.] Retract abuse (from). "On the Frau Doktorin's insistence, I disabused the cat of all the swears I had directed at him".

** Yamamoto and (one facet of) the history of GcMAF recently made their way into a Snopes article.