Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Integrative oncology: Where “individualization” really means “making it up as you go along”

As a cancer surgeon, one aspect of the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers that bothers me more than most others is how willingly academia has been to “integrate” quackery with science-based oncology to form the bastard stepchild known as “integrative oncology” that has metastasized to numerous cancer centers that should know better. […]

Categories
Bioethics Clinical trials History Holocaust Medicine World War II

Revisiting the issue of ethics in human experimentation

Progress in science-based medicine depends upon human experimentation. Scientists can do the most fantastic translational research in the world, starting with elegant hypotheses, tested through in vitro and biochemical experiments, after which they are tested in animals. They can understand disease mechanisms to the individual amino acid level in a protein or nucleotide in a […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Naturopathy versus science

Naturopathy has been a recurrent topic on this blog. The reasons should be obvious. Although homeopathy is the one woo to rule them all in the U.K. and much of Europe, here in the U.S. homeopathy is not nearly as big a deal. Arguably, some flavor of naturopathy is the second most prevalent “alternative medical […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

You can’t have naturopathy without homeopathy

Sometimes a comment in the comment thread after one of my posts ends up turning into the inspiration for another post. This is especially likely to happen if I respond to that comment and end up writing a comment of myself that seems way too good to waste, forever buried in the comments where, as […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The “integration” of pseudoscience into medicine continues apace

Beginning not long after this blog began, one recurring theme has been the infiltration of “quackademic medicine” into academic medical centers. Whether it be called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine” (IM), its infiltration into various academic medical centers has been one of the more alarming developments I’ve noted over the last several […]