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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants

Last week’s woo was pretty darned hard to top, don’t you think? It had it all, after all: Boner potentiation, penis enlargement, magnets, near infrared, and more. The only thing it lacked that would have made it absolutely perfect woo were references to pseudoscientific “vibration” or, even better, quantum theory. That’s the reason I could […]

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Announcements Skepticism/critical thinking

The 86th Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle: A bitch of a meeting. Really.

Sometimes being a skeptic can be a real bitch. And no one knows that better than the host of the latest installment of a blog carnival that has, believe it or not, been running over three years now, the ever-popular Skepbitch. She’s served up a heaping helping of the best skeptical bitching from the last […]

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Cancer Medicine

A (kind of) new cancer research blog

Although there are a lot of medical bloggers out there, there’s always room for more good blogging, particularly if it’s related to basic and translational research. That’s why the Cancer Research UK Science Update blog is worth checking out. It’s actually been around a while as an internal blog, but now it’s “gone public,” so […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

When popularity outpaces science in surgery

In science- and evidence-based medicine, the evaluation of surgical procedures represents a unique challenge that is qualitatively different from the challenges in medical specialties. Perhaps the most daunting of these challenges is that it is often either logistically impossible or unethical to do the gold-standard clinical trial, a double-blind, randomized placebo trial, to test the […]

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Biology Evolution Science

Geez, give a guy tenure…

…and suddenly he reveals his true stripes. Oh, well, at least the Hitler Zombie hasn’t eaten Jason’s brain, as he has so many of the others who complain about being Expelled! Yet. Thanks, Jason. I needed the laugh after the events of yesterday and today. Oh, and congratulations on getting tenure!