Categories
Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Another young life claimed by a misguided faith in alternative medicine

A number of readers have mailed me links to this story, and, yes, it is right up my alley. In reading it, I fear that it’s a vision of the future for two young cancer patients who are very unlikely to survive their cancers because their parents eschewed evidence-based medicine in favor of woo, Starchild […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Complementary and alternative medicine: A double standard

While I’m on the topic of alternative medicine and NCCAM again, I’ve said on many occasions that I reject the distinction between evidence-based medicine and “alternative medicine” as a false dichotomy. To me, the only dichotomy that matters is between medicine that has high quality scientific evidence showing that it works and medicine that does […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Woo infiltrates the very heart of scientific medicine in the U.S.

I’ve complained on multiple occasions about the infiltration of non-evidence-based “medicine” (a.k.a. woo) into every level of medicine in the U.S.. Worst of all, it’s infiltrating medical education in a big way, starting with the pro-woo activism of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), to various educational programs in various medical schools, to even the […]

Categories
Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

“Clinical research” on dichloroacetate by TheDCASite.com: A travesty of science

I hadn’t planned on revisiting this topic again quite so soon, but sometimes a piece of information comes up that’s so disturbing that I can’t ignore it and can’t justify delaying blogging about it by very long. So it is yet again with the strange and disturbing saga of dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecular chemotherapeutic […]

Categories
Biology Evolution Science

I’m waiting to hear Dr. Egnor whine about this…

A few days ago, I posted a note of congratulations to Gregory Simonian, a 10th grader at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, for winning the Alliance For Science essay contest, for which the topic was Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? At the time, the winners had been announced, […]