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Biology Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science

Epigenetics does not mean that thinking makes it so

You know, I really, really hate the way quacks abuse molecular biology. I know, I know. I’ve said it before, but certain quacks have a way of willfully misunderstanding the latest advances in genomics, molecular biology, and biology in general. Of course, this isn’t limited to just medicine, unfortunately. After all, we have Deepak Chopra […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine

“Proof” is not what most people think it is

Proof. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. That thought kept running through my mind as I perused an article appearing on an antivaccine website. Another thought that rant through my mind is that this was clearly not a scientist of any sort speaking. In science, […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Yet more evidence that “natural” doesn’t necessarily mean “safer”

Repeat after me one more time: Just because something is natural does not necessarily mean it’s effective or, more importantly, safe. If there’s one thing common among virtually all purveyors of “alternative” medicine, it’s that they fetishize anything they consider “natural.” To them, “natural” is always better. At the very least it’s better than those […]

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Medicine

Choosing Wisely when it comes to medicine

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Basically, overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of a condition that, if left untreated, would very likely never cause the patient harm. Because I’m a cancer surgeon, I’ve almost always written about overdiagnosis in the context of–you guessed it–cancer, particularly breast cancer. In breast cancer, for […]

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Medicine Science

Escaping zombies in order to develop better vaccines

As you might be aware, I’m (almost) always willing to help a blogger out, particularly when that blogger is a regular commenter here who’s gotten down and dirty battling antivaccine pseudoscience in the trenches of the comments right here on this very blog. Regular readers might have noticed that I rarely comment much on my […]