No turbo cancer at ASCO: William Makis vs. Scott Adams and A Midwestern Doctor instead?

This weekend, I’ve been attending the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting. I’m still here, but leaving for home this afternoon. (I’m leaving a little early and, unfortunately, will miss tomorrow’s sessions, but I have surgery tomorrow.) On Friday afternoon, as I was flitting from one session to another, a thought crossed my mind: Funny, but there were no sessions on “turbo cancer” on the program. In fact, not only were there no sessions, but there are no individual talks, abstracts, or even posters about “turbo cancer” on the program. This led me to post sarcastically:

One of my followers asked:

Nope. Not on the plenary session.

“Turbo cancer” is, of course, a nonexistent phenomenon. While it is true that antivaxxers had been claiming that COVID-19 vaccines could cause cancer as early as mid-2021, “turbo cancer” is, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, a term made up by antivaxxers sometime in 2022 to put a catchy, pithy name to the nonexistent phenomenon of a wave of cancers so aggressive, so nasty, so untreatable, and so fatal that they weren’t just your run-of-the-mill cancers to which everyone is prone. Never mind that, at the time, the vaccines had only been rolled out less than two years before, and we know enough basic science about cancer to know that the time from carcinogenic insult to a clinically diagnosed cancer is years—decades even. Indeed, as I’ve cited many times, studies of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings have shown:

What do these data show? First, the risk of developing a radiation-induced cancer is dose-related—the higher the dose, the greater the probability a cancer in an A-bomb survivor was caused by radiation exposure. Second, the A-bomb data allow us to determine the briefest interval from radiation exposure to cancer diagnosis. For leukemias, this is about 2 years, and for solid cancers, about 10 years. These increased risks, especially those for solid cancers, were most easily detected after 30 years and remain over a person’s lifetime.

In other words, it’s biologically incredibly implausible that COVID-19 vaccines could have caused a wave of cancers that started showing up a year after they were rolled out, even if they were as carcinogenic as large doses of ionizing radiation like what is released by an atomic bomb exploding. (It’s also rather ironic that the passage above comes from an article on radiation exposure at Chernobyl published in The ASCO Post. Not that anything like extreme biological implausibility bothered the antivaxxers and cancer quacks who glommed onto the “turbo cancer” narrative. Indeed, one eminent oncologist—the director of a cancer center even, someone who is at this meeting—has shown a disturbing receptiveness to this concept, even though there is no evidence to support the idea that there has been a wave of highly aggressive cancers since COVID-19 vaccines were introduced, and even the observation that there has been an increased incidence of cancer in younger people is often mis-cited by antivaxxers, who cite a study that looked at the decades before 2019. In other words, it’s true that cancer incidence among younger people has been rising, but the increase predates COVID-19 by decades, and there is no evidence an acceleration of the increase since December 2020, when the vaccines were introduced.

Arguably the most prominent and activist promoter of the “turbo cancer” myth has been delicensed nuclear medicine radiologist rebranding himself as an oncologist, Dr. William Makis. Makis, as you recall, lost his medical license in Alberta, Canada in 2017. While I can’t tell whether he or someone else made up the term “turbo cancer,” I do know that by late 2023 Makis was all-in on the claim that COVID-19 vaccines were causing “turbo cancers” and turning into a cancer quack under the guise of being a “health coach.” In Makis’ telling, COVID-19 vaccines are so full of mutating evil humors that they cause cancers that are not just run-of-the-mill cancers that anyone can get as they get older, but rather cancers so fast-growing and malignant that the are called “turbo cancers,” cancers. Never mind that he can’t define what the heck a “turbo cancer” is compared to regular cancers or provide any good evidence that cancer, much less “turbo cancers,” are associated with COVID-19 vaccination. Unsurprisingly, he was also all-in with using the anti-helminthic agent ivermectin to treat not just COVID-19 but cancer, including the fantasmagorical “turbo cancers.” As often happens, his protocol appears to have evolved to include other drugs that treat diseases caused by roundworms, like fenbendazole and mebendazole, which, in fairness, had been promoted as cancer cures before the pandemic. Going back through SBM archives, I noticed that I hadn’t written nearly as many posts about Makis as I thought, given how vociferously he’s pushed cancer misinformation and quackery.

Then I learned about a quack fight. However, I learned about the quack fight because I followed Makis’ reaction to being criticized by a high profile patient of his who realized that his quackery doesn’t work. Most surprising of all, this patient was Scott Adams. This led a quack who goes by the pseudonym of A Midwestern Doctor (AMD), whom I now prefer to refer to as A Midwestern Quack (AMQ).

First, let’s look at Scott Adams, who’s famous for being the cartoonist who created Dilbert, but who later turned to a lot of COVID minimization and denial during the pandemic, as well as antivaccine views towards the COVID-19 vaccine.

Scott Adams makes an announcement

I haven’t written much about Scott Adams before, other than to note that over time he has increasingly embraced COVID-19 minimization, antivax narratives (even saying that “antivaxxers were right“), and conspiracy theories, although there were signs as long ago as 2007 that he was slowly heading down the rabbit hole of unreason. (These days, he’s become fairly Trumpy, and President Trump apparently even called him after his announcement to check on how he was doing.) Adam’s history aside, a little more than a week ago he announced that he had been diagnosed with metastatic stage 4 prostate cancer; within a day or two of that came the post/Tweet cited above.

It’s unclear when Adams was initially diagnosed with prostate cancer, but he was fairly calculating about when he chose to announce his diagnosis. In fact, he quite frankly says that he decided to do so after former President Joe Biden had announced that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer:

It was not clear when Mr. Adams was diagnosed, but he said that he decided to share the news after learning that Mr. Biden had the same disease, in part because he hoped that Mr. Biden’s announcement would draw attention away from his own. He had kept quiet about it to prolong a sense of normalcy, he said: “Once you go public, you’re just the dying cancer guy.”

Mr. Adams said he was also wary of sharing his diagnosis because he wanted to avoid the kind of negative online attention that Mr. Biden has received since his office announced the news on Sunday.

“One of the things I’ve been watching is how terrible the public is,” he said, adding that people had been “cruel.”

“There’s no sympathy for Joe Biden for a lot of people,” Mr. Adams said. “It’s hard to watch.”

It’s true, too. Biden’s announcement immediately unleashed a storm of conspiracy theories, ranging from claims that his prostate cancer was a “turbo cancer” caused by COVID-19 vaccines to claims that he had been diagnosed last year and had kept it covered up so as not to affect his reelection chances. (That latter conspiracy theory doesn’t explain why he waited until a couple of weeks ago to announce his diagnosis.) Of course, even as he expressed concern about how news of his diagnosis would be received, Adams couldn’t resist adding to his statement that he had had his cancer longer than Biden has had it, “well, longer than he’s admitted having it“—and that after after having spent several minutes of the first part of his podcast wondering if Biden had known about his cancer in 2024.

I most definitely do get the idea. Makis has been burned by a famous, high profile cancer patient—not just a cancer patient, but a patient with stage IV incurable cancer!—announcing on his podcast that he has prostate cancer. Worse, he had tried ivermectin, mebendazole, and fenbendazole and had concluded that Makis’ concoction doesn’t work, saying:

Do you remember last year I was making a big deal online about the claims that ivermectin and fenbendazole are a cure for this exact condition? Well, in case you’re wondering, I did try that and I did try it with the assistance of the doctor who was the the famous doctor Dr. Makis, and it wasn’t that I believed it would work. It was just that there wasn’t much downside risk; so with my doctor’s you know blessing—he didn’t think it would work, of course—and it didn’t work at all. So I did it for a few months. My PSA probably went up by a factor of ten during that time. So what I was hoping was that it would work and then I could be, you know, part of the solution. Wouldn’t that have been cool? And so I was teasing you that I was working on something that that could be, like, life-changing but it didn’t work. So I can’t say that it never worked for anybody with some different cancer or some different situation, but I can tell you it didn’t work at all for me. So that’s all I know about that.

First of all, I do feel bad for Scott Adams. He repeatedly describes how he’s in pain all the time, how painful his eventual demise is likely to be, and how he was proud of having been part of activism to push for the State of California to allow terminally ill patients the right to assisted suicide. I also have to give him credit for quickly realizing that Makis’ quackery wasn’t working and that his cancer was continuing to progress. Given all that, I can overlook his digs at Joe Biden, his insinuations that he had known about his cancer for a long time before announcing it, and the like.

Adams even posted this to X on the same day as his podcast:

This post enraged Makis. Within hours of Adams’ announcement Makis posted on his Substack to respond to Adams’ having announced that Makis’ protocol didn’t work for him, calling the article Scott Adams reveals his Prostate Cancer and our attempts to beat it – my response to Scott’s Podcast:

I want Scott to beat prostate cancer, and respecting patient confidentiality, I will say this: 

Ivermectin and Fenbendazole combination has about a 75% response rate across all cancers. 

While that’s better than any cutting edge cancer treatment out there, I wish it was 100%. It isn’t. 

There is no way to predict who will respond and who won’t. It’s not an issue of prostate cancer. I have dozens of Prostate Cancer success stories. 

It comes down to the individual’s unique cancer cell type. 

For every patient who doesn’t respond, we adjust the dosing and the Ivermectin Treatment Protocol and we fight on to try and beat the cancer.

I have had several situations where 1000mg Fenbendazole didn’t work, but 2000mg Fenbendazole did. 

I have had situations where 1000mg Fenbendazole didn’t work but 1000mg Mebendazole did. 

I have had situations where 1000mg Mebendazole didn’t work but 2000mg Mebendazole did.

You get the idea.

I most definitely do get the idea. Makis has been burned by a famous, high profile cancer patient announcing on his podcast that he has prostate cancer. Worse, he had tried ivermectin, mebendazole, and fenbendazole and had concluded that Makis’ concoction doesn’t work. Despicable character that he is, rather than just shutting up and waiting for it to blow over, Makis has to attack, in the process using all the old tropes that cancer quacks use when it is shown to them that their quackery doesn’t work, including classics like:

• It worked for other people.
• Hey, Adams is an outlier, because my concoction works 75% of the time!
• The dose was wrong.
• Maybe he should have tried my other unproven drug, in this case mebendazole.
• It was Adams’ fault for giving up too soon. (That last part is implied, an insinuation.)

What really riles Makis up is a subsequent video by Adams, in which he reveals that he’ll be taking an experimental drug—no, not an “experimental drug” as quacks like Makis mean it, but a real drug that’s undergone real testing—even though it only has a 0%-30% response rate. At least, that’s what it sounds like. Certainly it’s what Makis thinks it is, given his reaction, as ranted in his Substack entitled SCOTT ADAMS and the Betrayal of Modern Medicine (love the selective all caps), although in the clip from Scott Adams’ podcast included with the post Adams remains kind of coy about it, saying for instance:

However, I have decided on a path of treatment that I’m not gonna tell you about. Now, it has to do with real doctors. It’s not going to be me grazing in my backyard and rubbing mud on myself like most of you are recommending. I’m not going to be taking ivermectin. I’m not going to be spending more time in the sun. I’m sure all those are good things. but I don’t believe any of them would make me better. I think somebody would have noticed if you could cure incurable cancers with just sort of minor diet changes and things like that. So the reason I’m not gonna tell you what I’m gonna do is because I know what the reaction would be

Adams then notes that the reaction “had started to turn” with the antivaxxers coming out and asking him if he got his cancer after getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Yes, Adams is right to say that these are “just terrible people,” because they are. In any case, Adams continues a little later:

So if you’re saying to yourself, I wonder if it’s X, no, because you’ve heard of it. If you say, I wonder if it’s Y, no. It isn’t because you’ve heard of that. So only a very few of you would have ever been heard of the path I’m taking. But it’s with top doctors. It’s not something I’m making up. It’s not some little thing I’m doing on my own. It’s with top doctors in the field who know a lot about this. And it looks like my odds of survival may have jumped from zero to something closer to 30%, which means don’t do my funeral yet. I’ve got a solid 30% chance of getting on the other side of this. And by the way, this is brand new. Like, this is information that I was not aware of until just recently. So I will give you updates at some point, but not until I know if it’s working, which actually won’t take long. So in a matter of, I don’t know, a month or so, I should have a pretty good idea if it’s working. But I’ll let you know.

To me, it sounds as though Adams is probably enrolling in a phase I or II trial of a new anticancer drug. I am, however, skeptical that anything could produce a 30% durable remission rate against metastatic prostate cancer, and I also suspect that Adams is probably conflating response rate (percentage of patients with measurable tumor shrinkage) with a “cure” rate. Be that as it may, I wish him well, as it sounds as though Makis is probably correct to conclude that Adams has enrolled in an experimental protocol of some kind.

Unsurprisingly, Makis can’t handle a high profile cancer patient like Adams repudiating his quackery as not having worked and choosing instead an experimental therapeutic with a low, but measurable, chance of prolonging his life; so he amps up his “blame the victim” narrative, even as he tries to pretend to be sympathetic to Adams as a having been “betrayed” by “Modern Medicine.” The giveaway is Makis’ complaints before he talks about Adams:

I was pleasantly surprised when Scott approached me in October 2024 for help with a serious health condition. Of course, I agreed to help.

Fast forward to May 19, 2025. Scott let the world know that he has terminal Stage 4 Prostate Cancer metastatic to bones, that he tried Ivermectin and Fenbendazole with my assistance and that it didn’t work.

He followed that up with a May 22, 2025 Tweet that again mentions my name and he has it pinned. It now has 2.3 million views.

Since Scott’s May 19, 2025 video, my Twitter account has been flooded with hundreds of negative messages, attacks, threats, smears and I have had to block hundreds of Twitter accounts to protect myself from the tsunami of abuse.

As they say: “No good deed goes unpunished”.

Poor baby. If you’re a cancer quack promoting misinformation and treating patients with unproven and disproven treatments, it’s to be expected that when a famous person tries your quackery and it doesn’t work you will be called out—and rightfully so! Some of your patients with treatable cancer likely paid with their lives, and you’re complaining of a little social media piling on? Seriously, dude, you’re pathetic.

So, what, according to Makis, happened? I bet you can guess. That’s right; there’s a whole lot of blaming the victim going on, but not before he blames Adams’ oncologists for having failed “to stop Scott’s cancer from progressing rapidly to a “terminal stage” in a short period of time,” because, if you believe Makis, “Prostate Cancer patients can live many years, even decades without progression, with the proper Cancer Treatment.” (Capitalizations his, not mine.) Of course, as any oncologist or urologist who treats prostate cancer knows, this characterizations is often, but far from always, accurate. Yes, mostprostate cancer patients who have the most common indolent varieties of prostate cancer die with prostate cancer rather than of it. Yes, we often speak of how in autopsy series 75% of men who live into their 80s have detectable tiny foci of prostate cancer in their prostates. These men with indolent disease, however, are usually older than Adams, who is only 67 years old, usually in their 70s and 80s (and beyond). Moreover, around 5-10% of prostate cancers are metastatic at the time of diagnosis, and there are aggressive subtypes that can grow and metastasize rapidly. Stepping back, we don’t know what stage Adams’ cancer was at diagnosis (mainly because he hasn’t really told us). Nor do we know which conventional treatments he’s undergone other than that apparently he’s never had surgery to remove his prostate and his primary tumor, which implies to me that the cancer was probably advanced and at least unresectable at the time of diagnosis. 

The next section of Makis’ lament is a master class in quack deflection and victim-blaming. Seriously, Stanislaw Burzynski couldn’t have whined more plaintively. First, he says that Adams was “betrayed” by Modern Medicine (again, Makis’ capitalization), because he took the COVID-19 vaccines, characterizing it as a “life-changing betrayal.” Actually, Adams had it right the first time getting vaccinated; where he went wrong was when he fell under the sway of antivaxxers and came to doubt vaccines.

Here’s the part that made me laugh out loud as Makis complains about Adams’ oncologist, whoever that oncologist might be:

In addition to failing to treat his cancer properly, Scott’s Oncologist lied to him, repeatedly.

First, he told Scott that Ivermectin wouldn’t work, even though he had no way to know whether it would or wouldn’t.

Second, he told Scott that he had 0% chance of survival and would die shortly.

I wish Scott had told us the name of his Oncologist, and the name of the Cancer Center he was treated at, so that other Cancer patients could avoid them and save themselves from harm. Unfortunately, he hasn’t given us these names.

Instead, he has given the world my name, for reasons I don’t understand.

Later on, he repeats his lament:

And yet, amidst all of this betrayal of Modern Medicine, Scott doesn’t give us his doctors’ names, or the name of the Cancer Center that failed to treat him properly.

Instead, he has my name pinned with 2.3 million views.

Again, poor baby! Actually, I rather suspect that Makis loves being the center of attention and is hoping to gain a few new marks from it, his expressed unhappiness notwithstanding. In any case, I approve. I always try to name and shame quacks like Makis whenever I can. Second, Adams was probably actually pretty smart here, given the social media reaction from antivaxxers to his post in which he announced that he had stopped Makis’ ivermectin and febendazole protocol.

I laughed even harder as I watched Makis try to avoid admitting that he’s almost certainly practicing medicine without a license:

I have never been Scott’s doctor. I was his Health Coach, very briefly.

How does a delicensed and disgraced quack avoid being prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license? He calls himself a “Health Coach” and then practices medicine anyway! Also, one wonders how much Makis charges for his “Health Coaching” services, one does! Actually, one doesn’t have to. You can Google him and find stories of his charging patients $650 just for email consultations in which he sends people a “personalized protocol.” Nice grift if you can get it. One wonders how much he charges for an in-person consultation (if he does them) or for a “telehealth” visit.

His grifting aside, it doesn’t take long before Makis goes on to claim that he barely knew Scott Adams:

Our Health Coaching relationship lasted 1.5 months, at which point Scott left.

Scott supposedly tried Ivermectin and Fenbendazole, for a total of 1 month.

Scott never completed my Ivermectin Protocol, which is a minimum of 3 months with follow-up blood work and imaging.

So we will never know if Ivermectin and Fenbendazole would have worked for him or not. Trying it for one month and then stopping, is not sufficient to make any sort of conclusion.

It is the equivalent of doing one chemo cycle, stopping and declaring chemo doesn’t work.

I might say “Fair enough” in response to Makis’ excuse-making, but there’s a difference. Chemotherapy has copious evidence developed over decades to show that it works, how it works, how it should be used, how long a course of therapy should be for the best balance between efficacy and safety, as well as hard data about its success and failure rates. Makis just makes it up as he goes along, clainming that it takes at least three months for his concoction to work and that it is not unusual for a prostate cancer patient’s PSA to rise during treatment because, according to him, that’s just evidence the magic of the treatment killing cancer cells. Where have I heard variants of “it’s just killing the cancer” in response to clinical evidence that a cancer is progressing? Hint: Lots of places and times! 

Yet, like quacks the world over who make excuses when their patients don’t get better or their patients’ cancers progress, Makis claims:

Scott didn’t try Ivermectin and Fenbendazole in any proper shape or form and we will never know if it would have worked for him or not.

Actually, we can know. It didn’t work. It wouldn’t have worked if Adams had stuck with it. There’s no good evidence, clinical or medical, to suspect otherwise.

Scott Adams is a bit of a crank, but that doesn’t matter now. I don’t like to see anyone suffer and die from cancer, not Scott Adams. If this is a crank fight, I know which crank I’m rooting for, even if Adams couldn’t resist conspiracy mongering about Joe Biden’s recent diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer. Everything I’ve observed about William Makis leads me to the opinion that he is not just an antivaxxer, but he’s a cancer quack—and a grifting cancer quack at that!—as well as a truly unpleasant person, to boot. Whatever my opinion of a cancer patietn as a person, I’m always going to be on the side of the patient against a quack like Makis. Always.

I especially will always be against cancer quacks like Makis when they brag about being asked for an interview by a New York Times reporter:

BREAKING NEWS: The New York Times has asked me for an interview about my Ivermectin Cancer Clinic!

New York Times reporter Stuart Thompson has reached out to me regarding a story he is working on “about cancer treatment groups that organize online” 

“I’ve seen your name come up a lot in these groups and I was hoping to connect with you to hear more about the experiences you’ve seen and the cases you have shared in support of the recommended treatment protocols.” 

Should I do it?

I run the world’s largest Ivermectin Cancer Clinic. We have the most Stage 4 Cancer success stories and we post them daily. 

Looks like we’ve caught the attention of the mainstream establishment!

But then the quack realizes that Stuart Thompson covers the misinformation beat, specializing on how misinformation spreads online, and decides to “politely decline,” although he has to announce his refusal to be interviewed online loudly for his followers to admire that he had been approached by a NYT reporter, as well as his “brave” stand for having declined. Seriously, man, I’ve been interviewed by NYT reporters a number of times. I don’t announce it when they email me to ask for an interview, and I don’t announce the results until and unless they are published in the NYT. (It’s not uncommon for me to be interviewed and be disappointed to find that the reporter used little or none of my quotes. That’s the biz. I don’t take it personally, and I don’t rant about it.)

Also, note to Mr. Thompson: If you happen to see my post, I’d be more than happy to talk to you about cancer quacks like Makis. I’ve been writing about them for over two decades, and Makis is very much a typical cancer quack, only on steroids in terms of his conspiracy mongering and sensitivity to being called out.

Then I noticed that another crank (who’s a big fan of DMSO, rather than ivermectin, as a cancer treatment) has entered the fray, and Makis is really, really unhappy about it. Makis vs. AMQ? Now there’s a quack fight I can enjoy, particularly given that I’m now saddened to have learned about Adams metastatic prostate cancer.

A Midwestern Quack enters the fray, and Makis loses it

One of the entertaining things about quack fights is that, under other circumstances, often the quacks engaging in the quack fight agree on almost everything else, and that is the case with A Midwestern Quack and Makis, the main difference being that AMQ really, really likes the solvent DMSO as a cure-all for cancer. Even more amusing, AMQ has been touting some truly bizarre “mechanisms” for how COVID-19 vaccines supposedly “shed” from the vaccinated to infect the unvaccinated with their evil humors.

So let’s see what Makis says in response to a Substack post by AMQ criticizing the sorts of quackery that Makis likes, in favor of AMQ’s favored DMSO quackery, which to him—and unlike that really, really, really works. Of course, Makis thinks that even mild criticism is part of a “coordinated attack.” As you will see, AMQ’s criticism is fairly mild, but that doesn’t stop Makis from labeling him as a sell-out.

After listing a long quote from a post by AMQ entitled Turbo Cancers and Alternative Cancer Treatments (seriously, AMQ is even more logorrheic than I am, and this post is basically one long screed disguised as science about the nonexistent phenomenon of “turbo cancers” caused by COVID-19 vaccines), Makis rants:

Midwestern Doctor’s smearing of Ivermectin, Fenbendazole, Mebendazole is more subtle than the very public approach taken by Scott Adams.

Midwestern Doctor admits he has ZERO experience but paints Ivermectin, Fenbendazole, Mebendazole as having only “small chance” of success. He states he only knew one case of success and it was “exaggerated”. He conveniently ignores the hundreds of success stories I have already posted on my substack.

Makis neglects to mention that the vast majority of his “success stories” on his Substack are behind a paywall. You have to subscribe to his paid Substack to read them. Moreover, the ones I’ve looked at have been no more convincing than any other alternative medicine cancer cure testimonials of the sort that I’ve been writing about now for over 20 years.

Makis also, unsurprisingly, thinks that AMQ has been co-opted because he praised Casey Means for Surgeon General. No, seriously:

They all show their true colors sooner or later, don’t they?

I was shocked when Midwestern Doctor came out in full support of Casey Means for the position of Surgeon General and the reasons for supporting her.

“Charisma”

“extremely effective communicator”

“advance MAHA message in to enter elite circles” (Elite circles??? Really???)

What I found far more distressing here was the apparent revelation that AMQ was approached about a position in the new administration:

I almost wish AMQ had taken the position. Then he/she/it wouldn’t be able to hide behind a pseudonym anymore. In any event, let’s see what AMQ actually said about Makis:

In my case, I learned about fenben (and then mebendazole) roughly a decade ago, and from consulting colleagues, found it sometimes worked, but in many cases recurrences followed. For these reasons, over the years, my network rarely used it, and I hence refrained from discussing the topic as I had no direct experience with it. Recently ivermectin got added into the mix in the and people began extensively discussing the miraculous cancer cures some combination of those drugs created. Because of that, I began to hear much more about it and:

• Periodically came across people in my community who’d used them without success.
• In the success stories I heard, enough other things were in the mix, I could not say if it was what worked.
• Both me and the Vigilant Fox received messages from people who’d taken it, it hadn’t worked and they were now desperate for our help because their cancer had metastasized and they didn’t know what to do.
• I came across one case where a widely seen success story attributed to this protocol was exaggerated and did not accurately reflect the patient’s medical records.
• A few doctors have shared with me that generally speaking, a positive response to ivermectin will be seen within the first 30 days, but it normally takes about 4 months to know if it will work (as the initial positive response can be followed by a treatment failure or a miraculous recovery). As such, many testimonials online that are based off only the first month of results are highly misleading.

Because of this, I feel that this protocol is something worth trying as it relatively safe, very affordable and accessible, and has a small chance of making a dramatic improvement that spares you from the nightmare of going through chemo and radiation therapy (hence making it dramatically better than most of the conventional options). However, I also believe the rampant use of miraculous testimonials to promote it (rather than consecutive cases or trials that also show the treatment failures) has created a massive inflation of its efficacy and individuals choosing to eschew other treatments who then either die or lose much of their faith in unconventional treatments.

Note: the only dataset I’ve come across where some aspect of this protocol has a high rate of success has been from people using topical ivermectin in conjunction with DMSO (discussed further here). In addition to a few success stories from readers, one doctor has tried this in his practice and reported topical DMSO-ivermectin treated a metastatic colon cancer, appeared to have a good response in 5 prostate, 1 breast and 1 ovarian cancer that had not metastasized (e.g., 4 PSA’s normalized), and may have helped a brain cancer (but for those 8 cases, conclusive data through imaging is still being awaited). Additionally, 30 or so other patients were recommended the protocol, but no followup was possible with them (due to his practice being both in person and a Telehealth, and those 30 being Telehealth rather than in person patients), so it is not known if they did the protocol or it worked for them.

I included this rather extensive quote because this is what apparently had set Makis off. Does it sound all that critical to you? Basically, AMQ thinks that Makis’ fenbendazole/mebendazole protocol is “wroth trying” because it’s “safe, very affordable and accessible, and has a small chance of making a dramatic improvement.” The only criticism seems to be that testimonials have been used to promote Makis’ protocol (which is based on a protocol commonly called the Tippens protocol), rather than consecutive case series. This made me laugh out loud, as testimonials and cherry picked stories are basically the evidence base that AMQ uses to promote his DMSO quackery.

Even more hilariously, later on in the same lengthy post, AMQ goes on and on about how complicated cancers are, but with the same sort of quack twist that cancer quacks about whom I’ve written have used going back to long before I started writing about this stuff 20 years ago:

One of the immensely challenging things about treating cancer is that to some extent what each cancer responds to differs and typically, there are a variety of precipitating factors in the background that cause cancers (e.g., certain nutritional deficiencies, traumatic emotions, excessive unopposed estrogen, systemic disturbances of the body’s microbiome, chronic infections such as those within root canals, poor sleep overwork and chronic stress, or impaired detoxification pathways).

Because of this, while certain treatments have a rather broad spectrum of applicability to cancers (e.g., IV vitamin C), the specific treatments people need greatly vary and the specific protocols we give people often greatly differ. Conversely, the only thing I know that works consistently is using complementary therapies to mitigate the effects of a conventional treatment (e.g., ultraviolet blood irradiation for chemotherapy or DMSO for radiation therapy) or potentiate them so lower doses are more likely to elicit a cure.

Yes, treating cancer is immensely difficult and complex. That’s why I come to meetings like the annual meetings of ASCO, various surgical societies, and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), to learn about the latest science regarding cancer and, sometimes, to present my research results. In contrast, what AMQ does is just to throw woo upon woo, quackery upon quackery, made up mechanism upon made up mechanism. That might look like complexity. It might even be complexity. However, it’s not a complexity rooted in reality, but rather in fantasy.

As for this quack fight, I hope to see what subsequent rounds reveal, not just for my entertainment, but to use as fodder to contrast what real science-based cancer care looks like compared to what quacks like Makis and AMQ deliver. In the meantime, I wish Scott Adams well and hope that he has a good response to whatever experimental drug he’s getting. If that doesn’t work, I hope that he seeks out and receives the best palliative care that science-based medicine has to offer. If there’s one difference between science-based medicine and medicine practiced by AMQ and William Makis, it’s that, whatever its shortcomings, SBM knows its limitations and doesn’t promote fantasy cures.

Finally, there’s a reason why there are no abstracts, talks, or sessions about “turbo cancer” here at ASCO. It’s the same reason why—although before he was appointed to run Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research CBER) at the FDA I had wondered if I might run into Dr. Vinay Prasad this weekend—I’m in zero danger of running into “Dr.” Makis or AMQ anywhere at the cavernous McCormick Place here in Chicago.