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History Politics

Iraq war = American Civil War? Election 2006 = election 1864? Bush = Lincoln? To some it’s all the same.

I was sitting in my office around 7:45 AM yesterday morning, going through my messages and mail in preparation for a long day of animal protocol and grant writing interspersed with meetings, the radio playing in the background. It was Curtis and Kuby, the usual talking heads show with a conservative paired with a liberal […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

From the ridiculous to the sublime: A journalist takes down Suzanne Somers over “bio-identicals”

Suzanne Somers annoys me. She annoys me because, despite the fact that her statements and activities over the last 25 years reveal her to be probably no more intelligent than the character that she played on Three’s Company, she still feels the need to spread misinformation about diet and medicine in several books that she […]

Categories
Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Justice for Abubakar Tariq Nadama at last?

A little more than a year ago, an autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama died of a cardiac arrest due to hypocalcemia at the hands of an “alternative medicine” practitioner named Dr. Roy Kerry while chelation therapy was being administered to him intravenously. Dr. Kerry, who trained as an ENT doctor, now bills himself as […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Medicine

Institutional review boards overreaching?

Institutional review boards (IRBs) are the cornerstone of the protection of human subjects in modern biomedical research. Mandated by the federal government in the 1970’s in the wake of research abuses of the 20th century, in particular the the horrors of the infamous Nazi biomedical experiments during World War II that were documented in during […]

Categories
Medicine Politics Science Sports

Another reason to hope that the Tigers crush the Cardinals tonight (as if one were needed): Jeff Suppan on stem cell research

This one’s for you, Afarensis (all in good fun, of course–well, for the most part, anyway): Here’s Jeff Suppan, pitcher for the Cardinals (who, it just so happens, will be starting game four of the World Series tonight) appearing prominently along with Patricia Heaton, Jim Caviezel, and other celebrities in a predictably lame “response” ad […]