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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

When “personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy” really means “making it up as you go along”

Last week, I applied a little not-so-Respectful Insolence to a movie about a physician and “researcher” named Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, founder of the Burzynski Clinic and Burzynski Research Institute in Houston. I refer you to my original smackdown for details, but in brief Dr. Burzynski claimed in the 1970s to have made a major […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

So chemotherapy does work, after all

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that there is a palpable hostility in the “alternative” medicine world towards chemotherapy. Many are the times I’ve posted examples, including rants by Mike Adams, cartoons, and a post about what I like to call the “2% gambit” that claims that chemotherapy only contributes 2% to survival […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

Two examples of “antivaccine”

In the process of laying down a little of the ol’ not-so-Respectful Insolence on the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), Barbara Loe Fisher, and Jenny McCarthy yesterday, I briefly discussed what the term “antivaccine” means. It’s a topic I’ve discussed at length before and that Steve Novella recently wrote about. The long version is in […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Surgery

Naturopaths vs. “stayin’ alive”

For all the good things about my life there are, there is one bad thing, and that was that I was born so that I reached high school age right at the height of the disco era. At least, that’s the way I viewed it at the time because at the time, like many teenaged […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

A one trick pony does his one trick

It’s funny, but it’s only been one week since I expressed extreme skepticism that that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, had reformed itself. The reason, of course, was that HuffPo had announced that it was starting a science section. Even though on the surface it seemed that HuffPo was making the […]