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

Suzanne Somers carpet bombs the media with napalm-grade stupid about cancer

There are two times a year that seem to be a time to beware of a serious assault of pseudoscience and quackery. The first time of year is in April, which is Autism Awareness Month. Over the last few years I can be just as sure as night following day, only to be followed by […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Popular culture Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking Television

Blogging Suzanne Somers Knockout, part 1: How cancer testimonials mislead

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. After a prolonged wait, it’s finally here: Yes, my promotional copy of Suzanne Somers new book Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer–And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place. (The Dalek was included because, well, I was just feeling perverse when I took this picture.) […]

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

Blogging Suzanne Somers Knockout, part 2: Is Somers a female Mike Adams?

This project is behind schedule. The reasons, I hope, are forgivable. First off, there was just too much other stuff going on last week, to the point where, even though I’ve read several chapters of Suzanne Somers’ new book (if you can call it that) Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer–And How to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Quackery

Dr. Google and Mr. Jim

What would we do without the Internet? It’s become so necessary, so pervasive, so utterly all-enveloping that it’s hard to imagine a world without it. Given how much it pervades everything these days, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t that long ago that the Internet was primarily the domain of universities and large research […]

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Cancer Clinical trials

New cancer drugs: Fitter, happier, more productive? Or not?

It’s known as “targeted” therapy, and it’s the holy grail of cancer research these days. If you listen to its most vocal proponents, it’s the path towards “personalized medicine” that improves survival with much lower toxicity, in which, instead of using the hammer that is chemotherapy, precisely targets specific molecular abnormalities that drive cancer growth. […]