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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Medical wiki revisited

Last week, I wrote a rather lengthy (or, as my detractors would probably call it, “long-winded”) post about the concept of a medical wikipedia. As you may recall, I expressed considerable skepticism about whether the wikipedia concept could work as well as its boosters claim it could. Even though others have clarified what a medical […]

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Bioethics Medicine

An update on Andrea Clarke

In the comments of my post regarding Andrea Clarke, the woman whom a Texas hospital is trying to pull the plug on because its bioethics committee has declared her care “futile” despite the fact that she is not comatose and is able to communicate her wishes comes an update posted yesterday to the Democratic Underground […]

Categories
Medicine

Carnival barking

Three blog carnivals to hawk today: 1. The History Carnival 2. RINO Sightings (May Day Show Trial Edition) 3. Grand Rounds has been delayed. It was supposed to show up at Polite Dissent, but when I checked out his site to look for it this morning, his blog was gone and a site advertising cheap […]

Categories
Bioethics Medicine

A case more disturbing than Terry Schiavo

A little more than a year ago, the entire nation was captivated by the case of Terri Schiavo. As you may remember, Ms. Schiavo was an unfortunate woman who lapsed into a persistent vegetative state after suffering anoxic brain damage after a cardiac arrest. Her husband insisted that she had stated that she never wanted […]

Categories
Cancer Medicine

Cure for cancer worth $50 trillion

Here’s an interesting tidbit that I came across: A new study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Political Economy, calculates the prospective gains that could be obtained from further progress against major diseases. Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel, two University of Chicago researchers, estimate that even modest advancements […]