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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

The scam of “detox”: Ritual purification by another name

“You need to detox.” How many times have you heard or read this? Maybe a friend of yours suggested it for the New Year. Maybe you saw it on a website, in a magazine, or as part of an ad. I like to say sometimes, “Toujours les toxines,” because in many branches of alternative medicine […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Is there a reproducibility “crisis” in biomedical research? (2017 edition)

About a week ago, I happened upon a number of stories about a study and project that demonstrates a key difference between science and pseudoscience. They had titles like, “Rigorous replication effort succeeds for just two of five cancer papers” (Science), “Cancer reproducibility project releases first results: An open-science effort to replicate dozens of cancer-biology […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Alternative Fake medicine endangers another cancer patient’s life

Kellyanne Conaway inadvertently gave us one of the most descriptive terms ever: Alternative facts. Alternative medicine is a lot like alternative facts in that it is unmoored from reality. Like alternative facts, it can also kill.

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Selling an alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial as an “N-of-1” trial: Integrative medicine’s new propaganda technique?

If there’s one thing that proponents of “integrative medicine” (or, as it’s been called in the past, “complementary and alternative medicine,” or CAM) take great pains to emphasize whenever defending their integration of prescientific and pseudoscientific medicine into medicine, it’s that they do not recommend using “alternative medicine” instead of real medicine but in addition […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine History Medicine Naturopathy

How cute. Naturopathic oncologists are pretending that theirs is a real medical specialty.

Naturopathic oncologists think that they’re real cancer doctors, to the point of even studying their specialty as though it were real. They couldn’t be more wrong.