Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The UT-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center embraces quackademic medicine

I’m a cancer surgeon. I started out as a general surgeon, but my passion and scientific interest goaded me into specializing in cancer. Ultimately, I ended up subspecializing even more, ultimately becoming a breast cancer surgeon, but through it all cancer, not just breast cancer, has remained my clinical and scientific passion. So has science-based […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

The ethics of clinical trials for terminally ill cancer patients

After chilling out for part of the weekend, yesterday I became so engrossed in writing my part of a training grant for my postdoc that, before I knew it, it was way too late to provide you with the Insolence you crave. Oh, well. Tomorrow for sure. In the meantime, I’ll post a couple of […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

The saga of Avastin and breast cancer

One of the most frustrating aspects of taking care of cancer patients is that in general, with a handful of specific exceptions, we do not have good curative therapies for patients with stage IV cancer, particularly solid tumors. Consequently, we are forced to view patients with stage IV cancer as “incurable” because, the vast majority […]

Categories
Biology Cancer Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Fructose and pancreatic cancer

I hate science press releases. Well, not exactly. I hate science press releases that hype a study beyond its importance. I hate it even more when the investigators who published the study make statements not justified by the study and use the study as a jumping off point to speculate wildly. True, it’s not always […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Cancer Treatment Centers of America, naturopathy, and “naturopathic oncology”

Note: Parts of this post have appeared elsewhere, but not in this form. If there’s one aspect of so-called “alternative medicine” and “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) is that its practitioners tout as being a huge advantage over what they often refer to sneeringly as “conventional” or “scientific” medicine is that — or so its […]