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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Can it be real? An FTC sweep goes after cancer quacks

As a cancer surgeon, I maintain a particularly intense contempt for peddlers of cancer quackery. Although I’ve been fortunate enough not to have had to see the end results of it more than a handful of times in my career, women with bleeding, stinking, fungating tumors with widespread metastases that could have been treated if […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Abraham Cherrix and the promotion of pseudoscience in medical school

One of the aspects of blogging that I’ve come to like is the ability to follow a story’s evolution over the long term and to comment on new developments as they come along. If you’re good at blogging, you can take that story and make it your own, adding it to your list of “signature” […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Weekend mailbag: Orac is a bad, bad man

After yesterday’s lovefest that really did go to my head. Really, when I wrote it I wasn’t trolling for praise, although in retrospect it now does kind of look that way to me. I was simply expressing amazement that anyone would listen to a pseudonymous (although not really anonymous anymore) blogger. Fortunately for my ego, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

If this keeps up, it all might go to my head, such as it is

Even after over three years at this, I still find it amazing that as many people read my verbal meanderings as in fact do. In fact, I still can’t believe that I’m one of the more popular medical bloggers out there. True, I’ll probably never approach the traffic and readership of the huge political blogs […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The beginning of another “alternative” medicine cancer testimonial

If there’s one thing I really detest, it’s cancer quackery. Indeed, one of the very earliest posts on this blog was about this very topic, and applying science, skepticism, and critical thinking to extraordinary claims of cancer cures has remained a major theme of this blog ever since. Shortly after that, I described how, because […]