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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

No, the New York Times did not “kill your patient.”

One of the more depressing things about getting much more interested in the debate over how we should screen for common cancers, particularly breast and prostate cancer, is my increasing realization of just how little physicians themselves understand about the complexities involved in weighing the value of such tests. It’s become increasingly apparent to me […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

Crank spin versus science on mammography

Sometimes when a study comes out that I’m very interested in blogging about, I don’t get around to it right away. In the blogging biz, this sort of delay is often considered a bad thing, because blogging tends to be very immediate, about being the firstest with the mostest, and the moment to strike and […]

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Cancer Medicine Politics

Simplistic criticisms of cancer therapy by Dr. Margaret Cuomo

I wondered how long it would take for someone critical of current cancer care to capitalize on the recently reported health misfortune of a celebrity. The answer, unfortunately, is “not long at all.” I will admit, however, that the source of that use and abuse of the misfortune of a celebrity was not the usual […]

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Medicine

Choosing Wisely when it comes to medicine

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Basically, overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of a condition that, if left untreated, would very likely never cause the patient harm. Because I’m a cancer surgeon, I’ve almost always written about overdiagnosis in the context of–you guessed it–cancer, particularly breast cancer. In breast cancer, for […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

Pertussis outbreaks and vaccine effectiveness

About a month ago, I deconstructed a typically dishonest and deceitful attempt by that Overlord of Quackery on the Internet (in my opinion, of course), Joe Mercola, to claim that the acellular pertussis vaccine doesn’t work. It was a typical Mercola bit of prestidigitation that, as so much antivaccine propaganda does, took a grain of […]