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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Quackery

Quackery of a different kind than I usually write about, part 2

About a week and a half ago, I wrote about a local oncologist who was arrested by the FBI for massive Medicare fraud in which physician involved diagnosed cancers that weren’t there, gave chemotherapy to patients who either didn’t have cancer or were in remission and thus didn’t need it, and had developed a self-referral […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Naturopathy Quackery

The director of NCCAM wants a "nuanced conversation" about "complementary and alternative medicine"

To say that I haven’t been much of a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) throughout the years is a gross understatement. If you want to see the depths of my—shall we say?—lack of enthusiasm for NCCAM, feel free to type “NCCAM” in the search box of this blog and […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

The key difference between alternative medicine and evidence-based medicine

Recently, I got an e-mail from someone who had just discovered my blog that made me think a bit, which is usually a good thing. At least, in this case it was. Basically, this reader asked me a question I hadn’t been asked in a very long time and hadn’t thought about in a very […]

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Cancer Medicine Politics Quackery

Quackery of a different kind than I usually write about

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog discussing failures of the medical system. Usually, such discussions occur in the context of how unscientific practices and even outright quackery have managed to infiltrate what should be science=based medicine (SBM) in the form of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine,” in which […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

Antivaccinationists against the HPV vaccine, Round 5,000

Whenever I take a day off from blogging, as I did yesterday because I was too busy going out with my wife on Wednesday night to celebrate my birthday, I not infrequently find an embarrassment of riches to blog about the next day. Sometimes it’s downright difficult to decide what to write about. So it […]