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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

When testimonials are used in medical advertising

(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer.) If there’s been one theme running through this blog every since the very beginning, it’s the unreliability of testimonials as “evidence” for the success of a cancer treatment. Indeed, if you go back to one of the very first “Orac-length” […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Movies Music Popular culture Quackery Television

When celebrities promote pseudoscience and quackery…

If there’s one thing that’s irritated the crap out of me ever since I entered the medical field, it’s celebrities with more fame than brains or sense touting various health remedies. Of late, three such celebrities have spread more misinformation and quackery than the rest of the second tier combined. Truly, together, they are the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Making legal threats against a blogging cancer patient? Stay classy, Shayla McCallum and Dr. Thomas Lodi. Stay classy.

I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it more times than I can remember. Purveyors of unscientific medicine don’t have the goods. If they had the goods, then their nostrums wouldn’t be called “alternative” medicine anymore; they’d just be medicine. Because they don’t have the goods in the form of science and clinical evidence, all […]

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Autism Blog housekeeping Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine

Orac knows quackery

As promised, here is the first list of links of “classic insolence” from the old blog. For new readers, this is a place to start as far as my writings about quackery and dubious alternative medicine: What is an "altie"? Understanding alternative medicine “testimonials” for cancer cures Battling quackery in conventional medicine How can intelligent […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine

What is an “altie”? (2006 edition)

About a year ago, I introduced the blogosphere to a term that had become common on certain Usenet newsgroups. I can’t take credit for coining the term, but I think I can take some degree of credit for disseminating it to a wider audience. That term is “altie,” and has a meaning similar to the […]