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Personal

Happy St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago

Thursday through Sunday, I happened to be in Chicago for the Society of Surgical Oncology annual meeting. Leave it to surgeons to schedule a meeting the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. In Chicago. That means the drinking in the city started Friday after business hours and continued all the way through Sunday–and that […]

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Bioethics Biology Evolution Medicine Science

Bad scientific arguments in the service of “animal rights” activism

One of the greatest threats to the preclinical research necessary for science-based medicine today is animal rights activism. The magnitude of the problem came to the forefront again last month with the news that animal rights terrorists tried to enter the home of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) whose research […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Getting clueless over the vaccine-autism “debate”

I’m about to head home from the conference; so I don’t have much time to do one of my usual posts. However, there is a brief bit that irritated me regarding the Hannah Poling case, and it comes from Dr. Sanjay Gupta: I want to continue the discussion today. Couple of points. First of all, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Question of the day: “Dis-ease”?

I got in somewhat late last night and was tired from the meeting, but there’s been something that’s been bugging me more and more, and Kimball Atwood‘s recent posts about the distortions of language used by “complementary and alternative medicine” advocates brought it to the forefront. I first noticed this particular term being used by […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The persistence of memory

The must-read post of the day comes from Mark Crislip of the (in)famous Quackcast and was posted over at the Science-Based Medicine blog. It’s about two things primarily: How evidence and science result in physicians practicing science- and evidence-based medicine to change their practice and why that seems disturbing to those who don’t understand how […]