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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Does mammography save lives? A new study shows that this is a harder question than you might think

Mammography is a topic that, as a breast surgeon, I can’t get away from. It’s a useful tool that those of us who treat breast cancer patients have used for over 30 years to detect breast cancer in asymptomatic women and thus (or so we hope) decrease their risk of dying of breast cancer through […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Mouse magic, or How lab mice learned to stop worrying and trust the healing energy

I frequently call homeopathy The One Quackery to Rule Them All, but there are times when I am not so sure that that’s the case. You see, there is…another. I’m referring, of course, to what is referred to as “energy medicine.” What energy medicine modalities have in common is that they postulate that there is […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Physics Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Quackademia at the University of Toronto: Antivaccine pseudoscience taught by a homeopath is “not unbalanced”

Aside from deconstructing the misinformation and pseudoscience of the antivaccine movement, another of the top three or so topics I routinely discuss here is the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine. In particular, I’ve found and discussed more examples than I can possibly remember of what I like to call quackademic medicine, defined as the infiltration […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The Triumph of New Age Medicine, part deux, courtesy of The Atlantic

There can be no doubt that, when it comes to medicine, The Atlantic has an enormous blind spot. Under the guise of being seemingly “skeptical,” the magazine has, over the last few years, published some truly atrocious articles about medicine. I first noticed this during the H1N1 pandemic, when The Atlantic published an article lionizing […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Humor Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking Television

Jim Carrey’s antivaccine rants are nothing new (a blast from the past, featuring Fire Marshal Bill)

In the wake of the passage of SB 277 into law in California, the antivaccine contingent went full mental jacket. SB 277, as you might recall, eliminates non-medical exemptions (i.e., religious and personal belief exemptions) to school vaccine mandates. One thing watching the crazy was good for, at least for me, was to note how […]