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Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

NCCAM: I say we take off and nuke the entire center from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Over the years that this blog has been in existence, beginning very early on, there has been one overarching theme. That theme is that the best medicine is science-based medicine. Sure, we could quibble about how that was originally defined, and I used to be more of a booster of evidence-based medicine until its blind […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Politics

Antivaccine activists try to flog Rep. Dan Burton’s fear mongering about an “autism epidemic”

Oh, goody. Remember last week, when I took note of how organized quackery’s best friend in Congress, not to mention a shining example of crank magnetism, Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, was taking the opportunity of his having announced that he would not be running for reelection this year to write a typically brain dead […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Preclinical research has a problem, but that doesn’t mean religion is better

Remember Vox Day? Sure, I bet you do, at least if you’ve been a regular reader of this blog more than a year or two. If you’re a really long-timer, you probably remember him even better. Let’s just put it this way. Vox is a guy who has a much higher opinion of his intellectual […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Politics

Dan Burton’s last antivaccine hurrah?

A couple of months ago, I couldn’t help but rejoice when I learned that Indiana Representative Dan Burton had finally, after twenty years in the U.S. House of Representatives, decided to retire after the end of this term. I thought that anyone in the U.S. who supports science-based medicine should rejoice, too, because I’m hard-pressed […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics

No, Virginia, cancer care in Europe doesn’t suck, contrary to what a recent paper implies

The U.S. is widely known to have the highest health care expenditures per capita in the world, and not just by a little, but by a lot. I’m not going to go into the reasons for this so much, other than to point out that how to rein in these costs has long been the […]