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Cancer Clinical trials Science

How should we treat stage 0 breast cancer?

I’ve written more times than I can remember about the phenomenon of overdiagnosis and the phenomenon that is linked at the hip with it, overtreatment. Overdiagnosis is a problem that arises when large populations of asymptomatic, apparently healthy people are screened for a disease or a condition, the idea being that catching the disease at […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

On teaching pseudoscientific controversies in universities…

About a month ago, a number of news stories were published reporting that the University of Toronto had offered a course in alternative medicine taught by a homeopath named Beth Laundau-Halpern that presented a segment that was clearly highly biased towards antivaccine pseudoscience. It was worse than that, though, because this homeopathy just happened to […]

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Medicine

“Integrative medicine”: The lure of the shaman healer

Quite to my surprise, apparently I’ve become fairly well known as a critic of so-called “integrative medicine,” that which used to be called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) but whose name was changed because its practitioners didn’t want to be “complementary” to anything. Rather they wanted their woo to be co-equal with science-based medicine (SBM). […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

The future of "integrative medicine" is now, unfortunately

I was depressed yesterday. I’ve been on vacation this week (staycation, actually, as I stayed at home and didn’t go on any trips); so you would think it would take a lot to depress me. It did. Scott Gavura over at Science-Based Medicine wrote about how another once-proud academic medical center, the University of Toronto, […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine

More credulous reporting on placebo effects

Now that Trine Tsouderos no longer works for the Chicago Tribune, there aren’t that many reliable generalist medical/science reporters around any more. For example, here in the U.S. there’s Marilyn Marchionne at the AP, Gina Kolata of the New York Times, and then there’s Sharon Begley, who used to be at Newsweek but is now […]