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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

On “helping” that is anything but

Cancer is a bitch. Depending upon what organ is involved and what kind of cancer it is, it can be incredibly hard to cure. All too often, it is incurable, particularly when it involves the brain, pancreas, esophagus, or other organs. People wonder why, after over 40 years of a “war on cancer,” we don’t […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Alternative cancer “cures”: Nothing’s changed in 34 years

Sometimes blogging topics arise from the strangest places. It’s true. For instance, although references to how tobacco causes cancer and the decades long denialist campaign by tobacco companies are not infrequently referenced in my blogging (particularly from supporters of highly dubious studies alleging a link between cell phone radiation and cancer and the ham-handed misuse […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

“All truth comes from public debate”: A corollary to crank magnetism

Advocates of pseudoscience like antivaxers love public debates. In fact, they think such debates are an excellent way to get at the truth. That’s not how science works.

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Biology Cancer Medicine Science

Is there gold in that thar genomic medicine?

I’ve written a lot about a doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have much better outcomes in treating deadly brainstem tumors than conventional oncology does. Although the way he claims to do it is through the use of substances he calls “antineoplastons,” which he claimed to have isolate from the urine of patients. Over […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies Television

R.I.P., Seán Ó’Laighin

This will be an uncharacteristically short (for Orac) post. A couple of months ago, I wrote about the sad story of a young man from Ireland named Seán Ó’Laighin diagnosed with an inoperable brainstem glioma at age 19. Even more sadly, this young man heard about the Burzynski Clinic in Houston and believed the claims […]