Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The ghoul returns again to feast on the flesh of celebrities

I waited. I knew it was coming. It had to. History was on my side. My quarry was nutty, but in a way exceedingly predictable. it wasn’t so much that I knew exactly what he would do. He wasn’t predictable in that way. It was that I knew he would do something crazy. Actually, on […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Another call to help vaccinate Las Vegas!

On Friday, I posted a plea for donations to the JREF effort to help poor families vaccinate their children against childhood diseases. Over the weekend DuWayne Brayton did me one better with his plea: I have been where a lot of those families are. While $25 may not seem like a hell of a lot […]

Categories
Biology Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics Science

Are we playing it too safe in cancer research? (Oops, Orac missed one)

This is just a brief followup to my post this morning about yesterday’s NYT article on cancer research. An excellent discussion of the NYT article can be found here (and is well worth reading in its entirety). In it, Jim Hu did something I should have done, namely check the CRISP database in addition to […]

Categories
Biology Cancer Medicine Politics Science

Are we playing it too safe in cancer research?

A couple of weeks ago, NEWSWEEK science columnist Sharon Begley wrote an article entitled From Bench To Bedside: Academia slows the search for cures. It was a rather poorly argued bit of polemic, backed up only with anecdotes that came across as sour grapes by scientists whose grant proposals the NIH had decided not to […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Humor Medicine Quackery

Taking the naturopathic option

If you had the choice between the “standard” option for insurance or the naturopathic option, which would you choose? (Click to see the full cartoon; it’s a bit old. But I hadn’t seen it before; so it’s new to me.) Of course, this is the very reason alt-med boosters don’t want anyone to have to […]