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Antivaccine nonsense Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

When “gut feelings” about science attack, or: Oh, no! Histidine and polysorbate-80 are going to destroy our girls!

Some people should keep their “gut feelings” to themselves. You know the type: People who have no knowledge about a topic or, even worse, just enough knowledge to sound as if they have a clue about it to people who don’t have a clue but who are at the same time easily spotted as utterly […]

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Announcements Clinical trials Medicine Science

ResearchBlogging.org v.2.0 is live

ResearchBlogging.org, that aggregator for blogging about peer-reviewed scientific research, has been given a makeover and a major overhaul. New features include: There will be much, much more on our official launch date of September 2, but here is a partial list of new features: Multiple language support (and 30 new German-language bloggers!) Topic-specific RSS feeds […]

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Clinical trials Medicine

Another reason why I’m leery of meta-analyses

The single most necessary task for a physician practicing science- and evidence-based medicine is the evaluation of the biomedical literature to extract from it just what science and the evidence support as the best medical therapy for a given situation. It is rare for the literature to be so clear on a topic that different […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The largest “randomized” acupuncture study ever done: Why did they even bother?

Believe it or not, there was one area of so-called “alternative” medicine that I used to be a lot less skeptical about than I am now. Homeopathy, I always realized to be a load of pseudoscientific magical thinking. Ditto reiki, therapeutic touch, and other forms of “energy healing.” It didn’t take an extensive review of […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Medicine

When clinical trials are designed by the marketing department

I must be slipping. Well, not really. It doesn’t bother me that blog bud and fellow skeptical physician PalMD beat me to an important publication that came out a couple of days ago in the Annals of Internal Medicine. I’m a surgeon and a translational/basic scientist; so Annals is not usually one of the journals […]