Categories
Cancer Medicine Surgery

Media medicine actually gets it right for a change

Granted, it is the print media, rather than the bubble-headed TV doctors that I railed against a couple of days ago, but even so I had a hard time believing this article in the Washington Post when it was forwarded to me. Compare: Washington Post article Part 1 and Part 2 of Early Detection of […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

The spontaneous regression of breast cancer?

I tell ya, I’m on the light blogging schedule for a mere four days, thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the happy invasion of family on Thursday and Friday, and a significant amount of grant writing I’ve had to deal with on Saturday and Sunday, and somehow I missed not only a study relevant to […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

On the enormous variability of cancer behavior

Perhaps one of the most common misconceptions held about cancer among lay people is that it is one disease. We often hear non-physicians talk about “curing cancer” as though it were a single disease. Sometimes, we even hear physicians, who should know better, using the same sort of fuzzy thinking and language about “curing cancer” […]

Categories
Cancer Medicine Politics

Overdiagnosis of breast cancer due to mammography

Screening for disease, especially cancer, is a real bitch. I was reminded of this by the publication of a study in BMJ the very day of the Science-Based Medicine Conference a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, between The Amaz!ng Meeting and other activities, I was too busy to give this study the attention it […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Reader e-mail: Why are you picking on Jenny McCarthy over vaccines and autism?

Last night, I received an e-mail from a fairly well-known atheist (no, it wasn’t Richard Dawkins, although that would have been totally cool) criticizing me for my post about Bill Maher’s complete unsuitability for the Richard Dawkins Award. I’m not going to reprint my response to that part, because, well, his criticisms were pretty much […]