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Medicine Surgery

The way to a surgeons heart…

…is through his plush guts, as Liz Ditz tells me: I particularly like the plush pancreas, even though I haven’t done pancreatic surgery on a regular basis since the 1990s. I’m a little confused, though, about why the plush gallbladder is purple instead of green. Surgeons really, really hate to see purple gallbladders, because the […]

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Medicine Personal Surgery

If you knew what you know now…

Hanging out last night, the final night of a three day holiday weekend, I was momentarily at a loss for what to write. For one thing, having spent a good chunk of the last three days unpacking the remaining stuff we’ve had in our basement in boxes for the last six or seven months, my […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

Why the whole “mitochondrial disease plus vaccines = autism” argument is nonsense

Since vaccines seem to be back in the news again, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a fantastic post that I saw the other day over at A Photon in the Darkness. Read it. Read it now. I’ve done fairly long posts about how pseudoscientists and antivaccine advocates are capitalizing on the case […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

A fungus among us in oncology?

I don’t much like Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com (formerly NewsTarget.com). Indeed, I haven’t yet been able to find a more blatant purveyor of the worst kind of quackery and paranoid anti-physician and anti-medicine conspiracy theories anywhere on the Internet, with the possible exception of Whale.to. However, Whale.to is so utterly, outrageously, incoherently full of not […]

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Cancer Medicine Surgery

Mammography from the patient’s standpoint

I’ve been a bit remiss in my duty toward a fellow ScienceBlogger. No doubt a few were wondering (or maybe not), why I, as the resident breast cancer expert here, didn’t point out that my fellow ScienceBlogger Janet live-blogged her very first screening mammogram last week. Truth be told, I had meant to mention it […]