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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

When faith in “alternative medicine” endangers children…

When confronted with skeptics who refuse to stay silent in the face of quackery–I’m sorry, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), a large proportion of which is unproven if not outright quackery–shruggies frequently ask, “What’s the harm?” I can reply that so many of these modalities are no more than elaborate placebos reinforced with magical thinking. […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Framing vaccines again

NOTE: This post, which is related to a discussion of Dr. Paul Offit’s Book Autism’s False Prophets, originally appeared over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club. However, now that the book club for this particular book has concluded, I am free to repost it here for those who may not have seen it and to archive […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Can it be real? An FTC sweep goes after cancer quacks

As a cancer surgeon, I maintain a particularly intense contempt for peddlers of cancer quackery. Although I’ve been fortunate enough not to have had to see the end results of it more than a handful of times in my career, women with bleeding, stinking, fungating tumors with widespread metastases that could have been treated if […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Abraham Cherrix and the promotion of pseudoscience in medical school

One of the aspects of blogging that I’ve come to like is the ability to follow a story’s evolution over the long term and to comment on new developments as they come along. If you’re good at blogging, you can take that story and make it your own, adding it to your list of “signature” […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The revenge of “microfascism”: PoMo strikes medicine again

I hate postmodernism. Well, not exactly postmodernism per se, but I hate it when pseudoscientists and purveyors of dubious “alternative” medicine treatments invoke bizarre postmodernist-sounding arguments to attack science or, in the case of medicine, science- and evidence-based medicine. Usually these attacks involve a claim that science is nothing more than one other “narrative” among […]