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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery Surgery

Dr. Judah Folkman: A true scientific giant has died

Today is a very sad day around my lab. I’ve just been informed that one of my scientific heroes, the man whose work inspired me to enter the research area that I entered, namely tumor angiogenesis, died last night. Yes, sadly, Dr. Judah Folkman reportedly died of a heart attack last night. I had the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Back to the future: When men were men, quacks were quacks, and the FDA was the FDA

Perusing the skeptical medical blogosphere, I came across some rather amusing, but nonetheless informative, videos from the 1950s about medical quackery. There are a number of aspects of these videos that are a bit unsettling to modern viewers, such as the “doctor knows best” paternalism, naïve faith in the AMA and other medical organizations, the […]

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Medicine Surgery

Surgery: Past performance is no guarantee of future results

In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in improving surgical outcomes. One strain of research tends to examine the “volume-outcome” relationship, which in essence asked the question if the volume of cases that a surgeon or hospital does has a relationship outcome. In other words, are mortality rates lower, survival rates better, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

More quackery promotion in the Chicago Tribune, only this time not by Julie Deardorff

Something must be wrong these days with the Chicago Tribune. I’ve complained about its recent tendency to publish credulous tripe about “alternative” medicine or sympathetic articles about alternative medicine, usually in the form of columns by the ever woo-friendly Julie Deardorff, but also in the form of a truly dumb (at least about medicine) columnist […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: How can you make acupuncture even more unbelievable? Oh, yes, add “harmonic” healing!

Vibrations. After a year and a half of doing Your Friday Dose of Woo every week with only a couple of breaks, it’s all I can feel or hear sometimes. Vibrations. What is it about woo and “vibrations,” “harmonics,” or “waves,” anyway? It doesn’t matter if it’s sound waves or electromagnetic waves. Somehow the denizens […]