Categories
Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery

An uninformative “experiment” on dichloroacetate (DCA) and cancer

I hadn’t planned on writing about dichloroacetate, the inexpensive compound whose success in treating experimental cancer in rats that provoked a blogopheric storm about a “cancer cure” that would supposedly never see the light of day because it’s not patentable. After all, I’ve done about seven posts on the topic, give or take a couple, […]

Categories
Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics

Drug safety versus a “Constitutional right” to access to experimental drugs

[Note: There is a followup to this post here.] I’ve been writing a lot about dichloroacetate (DCA) lately, perhaps even to the point of becoming repetitive and risking boring my readers. Fortunately, this post is not primarily about DCA. Unfortunately, it’s about a question that is related to the recent hype over DCA in that […]

Categories
Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Where to buy dichloroacetate (DCA)? Dichloroacetate suppliers, even?

Yes, I know that my blog buddy Abel wrote a post with almost exactly the same title as this. No, I’m not mindlessly aping him. I’m doing it because of what Abel revealed in his post: That most of his referrals lately have been Google searches looking for information on where to buy dichloroacetate, a.k.a. […]

Categories
Bioethics Medicine Religion

A physician’s obligation

I’ve written about the corrosive effect that religion can have on medical care when it is allowed to become too pervasive. One example where the intersection of religion and medicine concerns me is when various religious doctors insist on very dubious evidence that religiosity is good for a patient’s health and that physicians should therefore […]

Categories
Bioethics Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

Surgical research: “Tinkering” versus “innovation” versus “research”

Well, here I am in sunny Phoenix, having spent pretty much all of yesterday at the conference, sneaking in alterations to and practicing of my talk in between sessions. All in all not a bad day, although I spent the entire day indoors and didn’t get to partake of the bright and cheery warmth, which […]