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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Ah, the irony of it!

This is just too rich. As you know a few months ago, I commented about a British report that found high levels of mercury and other heavy metals in Chinese herbal medicines sold in the U.K. Some contained as much as 11% mercury by weight! It turns out that a JAMA paper from 2004 did […]

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Medicine

The rewards of being a physician

You know, sometimes medicine sucks, particularly oncology. Oh, it’s not so bad for surgeons, particularly breast surgeons, because we can cure many of the patients we operate on. But for solid tumor oncologists, who deal with diseases that current medicine can’t cure but only palliate day in and day out can, if you don’t get […]

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Medicine

It’s just a little decimal point

Here’s a scary error, reported by Abel Pharmboy: David Douglas of Reuters Health reported last Friday on the publication of a clinical trial revealing that a one-week trial of Benadryl (diphenhydramine HCl) was superior to Clarinex (desloratadine) in managing symptoms of moderate-to-severe allergic rhinitis, or hay fever. The article was published in the April 2006 […]

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Evolution Medicine Science

Medicine and evolution, part 5: “Quit whining” about intelligent design?

One annoying thing about the blogosphere for someone like me is that a lot of things that I want to write about pop up during the day, when I’m at work. Blogging is all about immediacy and time. Wait too long to write about a topic, and the moment’s passed. For me, by the time […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

How long before I run out of variations on the same lame joke about answering my Seed overlords?

It seems a reasonable question to ask, given my propensity for it. Unfortunately that’s not what our Seed overlords asked this week. This week, they ask: If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be? Predictably, some ScienceBloggers answered: evolution and what it really means, not the […]