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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Integrating patient experience into research and clinical medicine: Will this lead to true “personalized medicine”?

I advocate science-based medicine (SBM) on this blog. However, from time to time, consider it necessary to point out that SBM is not the same thing as turning medicine into a science. Rather, I argue that what we do as clinicians should be based in science. Contrary to what some might claim, this is not […]

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Humor Politics

For whenever I start feeling sorry for myself

I know I kvetch from time to time about the currently dismal funding situation for biomedical research and worry about whether I’ll be able to keep my lab funded. However, every so often I’m reminded that cancer researchers by and large have it pretty good, at least compared to some academic disciplines:

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

What’s in a placebo? Mike Adams certainly doesn’t know.

If there’s one thing that confounds advocates of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), it’s the placebo effect. That’s because, whenever most such remedies are studied using rigorous clinical trial design using properly constituted placebo controls, they almost always end up showing effects no greater than placebo effects. That’s the main reason why they frequently […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion

A fallacy-laden attack on science-based medicine, revisited

On Monday I took a blogger by the name of Dr. Marya Zilberberg to task for firing a series of profoundly anti-scientific broadsides against science-based medicine (SBM). Although I did not attack Dr. Zilberberg personally, I was quite harsh in my characterization of her attacks, because, well, they were quite bad, full of straw men, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Medicine Quackery

Who knew? Mike Adams and I share a problem

Forgive me if I’m feeling a little schadenfreude right now. My current blog location has been criticized in the past for a variety of things, including, most recently, Pepsigate. One of the things that we’ve been criticized for is our on-again off-again use of Google Adsense, where the content of the page dictates which ads […]