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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Quackademic medicine infiltrates a major cancer conference

As if yesterday’s post weren’t depressing enough, last weekend I attended the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago, which is part of the reason I didn’t produce much in the way of posts about a week ago. Last Sunday, while aimlessly wandering from session to session and checking […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Stanislaw Burzynski publishes his antineoplaston results again. It’s no more convincing than last time.

Here we go again. Two months ago, I noted that Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Polish expatriate physician who started out as a legitimate medical researcher and then in the late 1970s took a turn away from science-based medicine and towards being a “brave maverick doctor” through his discovery in blood and urine of substances he […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

One more example of conservative antivaccinationism

The other day, I expressed my disappointment at how Samantha Bee of The Daily Show got the politics of antivaccinationism wrong in a segment that was funny, but promoted the stereotype of antivaccine activists as being mainly crunchy lefties. In that post, I mentioned how the Texas Republican Party had a plank in its platform […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Integrative medicine does not “bring deeper meaning to personalized health care”

I’ve discussed the evolution of “integrative” medicine on many occasions. To make the long story discussed over many posts short, medicine based on prescientific and/or unscientific ideas was once, appropriately, referred to as quackery, and those practicing it, appropriately, as quacks or charlatans—or other derogatory terms. Then, beginning sometime around the 1960s and 1970s, such […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture Quackery

Two and a half months later, quacks are still upset about Wikipedia

Quacks really hate Wikipedia. It’s understandable, really. Wikipedia has some fairly tight standards regulating its form and content. Quacks, thinking that because anybody can edit Wikipedia articles it must mean that they can edit the entries on their favorite bit of woo to their hearts’ content in order to make it look more scientifically supported […]