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Cancer Friday Woo Medicine Personal

Sorry, no woo for you today. Or: Cancer isn’t just for humans

Today is Friday, which has normally meant for the last two years that it’s the time every week when I poke fun at some particularly outrageous woo. Indeed. I even had a great idea for a 4th of July-themed post today that (I hope) would have been hilarious. I had even started to write a […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

The paradox of screening mammography and breast cancer

If there’s one thing that lay people (and, indeed, many physicians) don’t understand about screening for cancer is that it is anything but a simple matter. Intuitively, it seems that earlier detection should always be better, and it can be. However, as I explained in two lengthy posts last year, such is not always the […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Can it be real? The FDA brings the hammer down on bogus cancer cures

I’m a cancer surgeon, and if there’s one thing that drives me straight to the liquor cabinet it has to be quack cancer “cures.” Very early in the history of this blog, I discussed one of the biggest quacks of all time, a woman who thinks that all cancer is caused by a liver fluke […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

On the enormous variability of cancer behavior

Perhaps one of the most common misconceptions held about cancer among lay people is that it is one disease. We often hear non-physicians talk about “curing cancer” as though it were a single disease. Sometimes, we even hear physicians, who should know better, using the same sort of fuzzy thinking and language about “curing cancer” […]

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Cancer Medicine

A (kind of) new cancer research blog

Although there are a lot of medical bloggers out there, there’s always room for more good blogging, particularly if it’s related to basic and translational research. That’s why the Cancer Research UK Science Update blog is worth checking out. It’s actually been around a while as an internal blog, but now it’s “gone public,” so […]