Categories
Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Update on Katie Wernecke

Things have been very quiet as far as the story of Katie Wernecke, the 14-year-old girl with lymphoma whose parents fought a legal battle with the State of Texas to be able to choose “alternative” therapy involving high dose vitamin C, despite the fact that her conventional therapeutic options had not been exhausted and she […]

Categories
Bioethics Cancer Medicine

Dubious benefits versus profits in chemotherapy

At the monthly faculty meeting of our cancer center the other day, we had just finished listening to an invited talk by an ethicist about medical technology and the ethics of end-of-life care, when one of my colleagues happened to mention an article in the New York Times about how a perverse incentive system encourages […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

So he’s not just a bad actor, but he’s a woo-meister as well

Is your qi weak? Is your aura not glowing as brightly and colorfully as it should? Is your ability to take on ten masked men who conveniently come at you no more than one or two at a time getting shaky, so that you’re no longer sure that you can handle more than, say, five […]

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Entertainment/culture Science Television

R.I.P., Mr. Wizard

Via Boing-Boing, I learn that Don Herbert, a.k.a. “Mr. Wizard,” has died. He lived to a ripe old age of 89. Perhaps the best tribute to him is this: “Over the years, Don has been personally responsible for more people going into the sciences than any other single person in this country,” George Tressel, a […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Paranormal Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

More antiscience from an old “friend”

Yesterday, I discussed how pseudoscience–nay, antiscience–may well triumph over science in the Autism Omnibus trial presently going on. One reason that this might happen is because of the primacy of feelings over evidence among the plaintiffs, to whose power even the Special Masters running the trial are not entirely immune. As a fellow human being, […]