Categories
Cancer Medicine Popular culture Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Annabelle Potts tragically dies. The quacks at Clínica 0-19 didn’t save her.

Annabelle Potts was a girl with the deadly brain cancer known as diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) whose family was victimized by quacks. Unfortunately, that’s not how the media is reporting it. As is frequently the case, Annabelle’s story is being presented as one of triumph, and the quacks who treated her as legitimate experimental therapy.

Categories
Cancer Computers and social media Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

How online crowdfunding supports cancer quacks (part 2)

A new study by Jeremy Snyder and Tim Caulfield shows how much money is raised by GoFundMe and other crowdfunding sources to support quackery. It’s a lot of money, which is unsurprising to Orac, given that he’s been writing about how crowdfunding is “baked into” the business model of cancer quacks since he discovered Stanislaw Burzynski a decade ago.

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Cancer Medicine Popular culture Religion

Roxli Doss: A deadly brain tumor shrinks to undetectable without quackery

Roxli Doss is an 11-year-old girl from Texas diagnosed with the deadly brain cancer DIPG. After radiation therapy, her deadly cancer is undetectable, no alternative cancer cures sought or used. What happened?

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bad science Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery

Dr. Ken Walker (a.k.a. Dr. W. Gifford-Jones) plays the martyr over his antivaccine op-ed

Dr. Ken Walker (more famously known as Canadian syndicated columnist Dr. W. Gifford-Jones) wrote an antivaccine op-ed for The Toronto Sun so full of antivaccine misinformation that was retracted after a flurry of complaints and bad publicity. Now, he plays the martyr. Unfortunately for him, he does it while spewing the same sort of antivaccine misinformation for which his previous op-ed had been retracted.

Categories
Bad science Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Will the Medical Board of California crack down on the stem cell hard sell?

For-profit stem cell clinics selling unproven and downright quacky stem cell therapies have proliferated over the last several years, with federal and state law seemingly powerless to stop them. Recently, the FDA and FTC have shown signs of acting to crack down on them. Now, the Medical Board of California is forming a task force to determine how to regulate physicians offering these unproven therapies. Will it matter?