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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Movies Popular culture Quackery Television

Farrah Fawcett: Dead of cancer at age 62

Unfortunately, I saw this coming, although I had thought that it might be a few more months. Farrah Fawcett has lost her three year battle with anal cancer: Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and bewitched a generation of men, beginning with […]

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Cancer Computers and social media Medicine

What’s wrong with Steve Jobs: Yes, Jobs did have a liver transplant, but was it for metastatic insulinoma?

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the reason for Apple CEO Steve Job’s five month medical leave of absence from Apple is that he needed a liver transplant, which, according to the story, he underwent a couple of months ago in Memphis. In my discussion, I assumed, for the most part, the […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Update: Daniel Hauser must continue chemotherapy

The other day, I came across an update on the Daniel Hauser saga. Specifically, I commented about how he is not only undergoing the chemotherapy ordered by his doctors. As you may recall, Hauser is a 13-year-old boy who, after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and undergoing one round of chemotherapy, refused to undergo any […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

Electroacupuncture: The bait and switch of alternative medicine

At the risk of repeating myself (but, then, since when did such concerns ever stop me before?), I’ll just start out by mentioning that, of all the non-herbal “alternative” medicine remedies out there, I used to give a bit of a pass to acupuncture. No, I never did buy any of that nonsense about how […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Humor Medicine Quackery Television

Stephen Colbert on the Zicam fiasco

Last week, I wrote about the FDA’s warning about the zinc-containing “homeopathic” cold remedy known as Zicam. Basically, Zicam was approved without testing to show it to be both safe and efficacious because it slipped in using an old 1938 law that allows homeopathic remedies to bypass the usual process for FDA approval. Too bad […]