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Medicine Surgery

One reason I don’t do general surgery anymore

Two words: Necrotizing pancreatitis. There’s nothing like repeated trips to the operating room to scoop out bits of dead pancreas, trips sometimes so frequent that we leave the abdomen open to facilitate repeat visits, in patients who are about as sick as any patient you’ll ever see. There are few, if any, problems in general […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Popular culture Television

Jenny McCarthy and Oprah Winfrey: Two crappy tastes that taste crappy together on autism

I have to tip my hat to Kevin Leitch. I really do. He’s done something that I couldn’t manage to force myself to do, at least not completely. He’s

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Paranormal Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: In which I am given a woo-ducation in neuroscience

As I usually do on Thursday nights, I was perusing my legendary Folder of Woo looking for just the thing to be interesting and entertaining to both me as the blogger and you as the reader. As happens occasionally, nothing was really doing it for me. Nothing was getting me fired up to launch into […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Some antivaccination stupidity about autism on Daily Kos

I don’t know how I missed this one, but it jut goes to show that antivaccination ignorance with respect to autism is truly a bipartisan affair. You have folks like Representative Dan Burton on the right, and on the left you have this particular Daily Kos diarist, who falls like a ton of bricks for […]

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Medicine Politics

It’ll take more than Shannon Brownlee’s bloviations to make this doctor’s head explode

Mike the Mad Biologist posts a link to and excerpt from an article that he seems to think will make “M.D.’s heads explode.” It didn’t. At least, not in the case of this M.D. Basically, it’s about physician reimbursement, a topic guaranteed provoke controversy, divided between those who think doctors are already overpaid (most non-physicians) […]