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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Homeopathic ophthalmology and chromatotherapy? Keep my eyes away!

Contrary to what you might think, the longer I do this blogging thing, it doesn’t necessarily get easier. The reason, of course, is that after more than nine years of near daily posts there are days when it’s really hard to come up with something that really gets me fired up to do the hard […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Quackery Religion

I fear that Sarah Hershberger is now doomed

I am afraid. I am afraid that the Amish girl with cancer whose parents’ battle to treat her with “natural” therapy instead of effective science-based chemotherapy has made international news, is doomed. It might take longer than doctors have estimated, but it seems inevitable now. I will explain. It’s hard to believe that it’s been […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery

So chemotherapy does work, after all (revisited)

If there’s one medical treatment that proponents of “alternative medicine” love to hate, it’s chemotherapy. Rants against “poisoning” are a regular staple on “alternative health” websites, usually coupled with insinuations or outright accusations that the only reason oncologists administer chemotherapy is because of the “cancer industrial complex” in which big pharma profits massively from selling […]

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Clinical trials Medicine Politics

The fallacious attacks on Obamacare and Medicaid continue apace…

Tomorrow, as mandated by the Patient Protection and the Affordable Care Act (PPACA, often called just the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, or “Obamacare”), the government-maintained health insurance exchanges will open for business (that is, assuming the likely government shutdown doesn’t stop them temporarily). This post will be basically a followup to a post I […]

Categories
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 […]