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Bioethics Cancer Medicine Quackery Religion

Would you die for your religion? part 2: What about the children?

It looks as though the Jehovah’s Witnesses have claimed another life. This time, though, it wasn’t an adult, as it was recently. This time, though, through the indoctrination inherent in the Jehovah’s Witness religion and, incredibly and inexcusably, the acquiescence of our legal system to their irrational and dubious interpretation of a text written thousands […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Lee Woodard on the Chad Jessop melanoma story: “Why would I promote a hoax?”

Ever since I started blogging about a story about a youth named Chad Jessop who, it was claimed, developed melanoma and cured himself of it with “natural” remedies, with the result that his mother was supposedly brought before the Orange County Superior Court and his mother thrown in maximum security prison and denied the right […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

“I have seen the light! The Chad Jessop melanoma story happened. Really.”

Yesterday’s mega-post left me a bit drained; consequently I’ve throttled my ambitions back a notch today in order to leave some energy to put together the weekly installation of Your Friday Dose of Woo tomorrow. Fortunately, just the topic presented itself: A story that’s interesting and instructive (hopefully) but that won’t take as much of […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

I fought the woo, and the woo won? Or: Gotta have more woo in my medical school, revisited

Over the last couple of days, I’ve discussed “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) in terms of a meme upon which evolutionary forces are acting to select certain forms of woo over others in academia. Although, in my usual inimitable fashion, I probably carried the concept one step too far, in the end I concluded that […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Medicine Quackery Science

Applying evolutionary principles to alternative medicine again

Yesterday, inspired by a post by fellow ScienceBlogger Martin, I had a little fun discussing the evolution of “alternative” medicine (a.k.a. “complementary and alternative medicine” or CAM), specifically speculating about the possible selective pressures, positive and negative, that have influenced the course that its evolution took. Essentially, the discussion centered around whether, by its very […]