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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science

Another preventable death thanks to alternative medicine

What is it about Florida and quacks? It’s as though it’s the Wild West there when it comes to regulating the practice of medicine. There, quacks can get away with almost anything, or so it would seem. After all, Brian Clement, who isn’t even a doctor and isn’t even really a naturopath either, has been […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Measles outbreaks and the debate over how far we should go requiring vaccination

Whenever we discuss vaccines and vaccine hesitancy, thanks to Andrew Wakefield the one vaccine that almost always comes up is the MMR, which is the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. In 1998, Wakefield published a case series of cherry-picked patients in which he strongly inferred that the MMR vaccine was associated with autism and “autistic enterocolitis.” Of […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

CAM and low flu vaccine uptake: Fitting together hand in glove

There’s a class of studies that I sometimes refer to as “Well, duh!” studies because their conclusions are so mind-numbingly obvious that one wonders why anyone did the study in the first place. Sometimes that name is meant sarcastically, as in, “Why did these investigators waste the time, effort, and resources to do this study? […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Your tax dollars at work: New clinical trial of chelation therapy, new and old quacks enrolling patients

Whenever I refer to quackademic medicine and how the infiltration of quackery into medical academia has led to unethical clinical that are not only pseudoscientific wastes of money but potentially downright harmful to patients, two always come to mind. The first is the trial that tested the late Nicholas Gonzalez’s protocol for advanced pancreatic cancer, […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

With a little help from its friends, NCCIH funds Son of TACT to study chelation quackery again

One of the things that first led me to understand the dangers of quackademic medicine was a trial known as the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy, or TACT. Chelation therapy, as you might recall, is the infusion of a chelating agent, or a chemical that binds heavy metals and makes it easier for the kidney […]