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

Another young woman with cancer, lured into quackery by Ty Bollinger

It sucks to be diagnosed with cancer at any age, but it especially sucks to be young and diagnosed with cancer. The prompt application of science-based cancer treatment is important for anyone with cancer, but it’s especially important for young people with cancer, because they have the most life-years to lose if they dawdle or […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Cancer patients do not need or want suggestions for alternative cancer cures

Over the last week or so, I’ve noticed (or had brought to my attention) a series of articles discussing a phenomenon related to alternative medicine that I don’t believe that I’ve addressed before, at least not directly anyway. I had filed some of these in my folder of topics for blogging, but somehow never got […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

When alternative medicine cancer cures fail, it’s always the patient’s fault. Always.

After a trilogy of posts on the lamentably bad decision on the part of the Tribeca Film Festival to screen a pseudoscience- and misinformation-filled documentary by hero to the antivaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield, that is basically one long conspiracy theory, I thought it was time for a change. I had briefly toyed with the idea […]

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Medicine

How overdiagnosis produced a nonexistent “epidemic” of thyroid cancer in Fukushima

One of my favorite topics to blog about over the last six or seven years has been the topic of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. These are two interrelated phenomena that most people are blissfully unaware of. Unfortunately, I’d also say that the majority of physicians are only marginally more aware than the public about these confounders […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Science

No, cancer is not the “best death,” and curing cancer would be anything but a waste of resources

Medical research is a scientific enterprise, but, like most areas of science, nonscientific considerations have a great deal of influence over what sorts of research are funded. This is true regardless of who is funding the research. When it’s the government, obviously it’s impossible to avoid some degree of politics. (Indeed, politics is largely responsible […]