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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The price of quackery

I don’t have much to add to this one, as it’s a tragic tale. Shadowfax, a blogging ER doc, relates to us what happens when cancer patients rely on quackery like the Gerson protocol instead of scientific medicine: This was a young woman, barely out of her teens, who presented with a tumor in her […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Dr. Mark Hyman mangles autism science on–where else?–The Huffington Post

Dr. Mark Hyman is famous as the “founder” of a form of woo known as “functional medicine.” This new form of woo is…well, I’m not sure what it is, and neither are Wally Sampson (1, 2, 3, 4). Suffice it to say that it appears to be a serious grab bag of various forms of […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Daniel Hauser continues to do well

Remember Daniel Hauser? He’s the the 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin’s lymphoma who underwent one course of chemotherapy and then decided he wanted to pursue “alternative therapy” based on fear of chemotherapy and because of the influence of the faux Native American religion that his mother had taken up with. Ultimately, after a judge ordered Daniel’s […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Thanks, Dr. Oppel, we need to see a lot more of this

If there’s been a theme running through this blog, it’s been the importance of science and critical thinking. The main focus of this emphasis on skepticism, of course, has been medicine, which makes sense, given that I’m a doctor and a cancer researcher, but I don’t limit myself to just medicine. However, as part of […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Appeals to other ways of knowing for “integrative” medicine

So-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, as it’s now as frequently called, “integrative medicine” (IM) represents a hodge-podge of remedies that are mostly based on prescientific concepts about how the human body works and how disease attacks it. Homeopathy, through its concept of “like cures like” and law of contagion. The former in essence […]