Categories
Cancer Evolution Medicine Science

Medicine and evolution, part 13: The fly in the ointment of personalized cancer therapy

About a year ago, I addressed what might seem to the average reader to be a very simple, albeit clichéd question: If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we cure cancer? As I pointed out at the time, it’s a question that I sometimes even ask myself, particularly given that cancer […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery Television

Dr. Oz promotes quackery…again

Note: Today’s a travel day. I’m driving home from the AACR. As a result, I decided to post something that appeared elsewhere, doing a quick edit to make it a bit more “insolent.” I realize that since the show I discuss aired an episode during which he featured a psychic medium in a segment called […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

The antivaccine movement resurrects the zombie that is the “autism epidemic”

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned that I can always–and I do mean always–rely on from the antivaccine movement, it’s that its members will always be all over any new study regarding vaccines and/or autism in an effort to preemptively put their pseudoscientific spin on the results. It’s much the same way that they […]

Categories
Clinical trials Medicine Politics Quackery

Acupuncture: Not an “essential health benefit” in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

This week, the Supreme Court is hearing a case that can only be described as historic. Any of you out there (in the U.S. anyway; I realize that my readership is international) who have paid even a passing attention to the news can’t help but avoid reporting, debate, and polemics related to the Patient Protection […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Dr. Bob Sears vs. Seth Mnookin: Measles outbreaks, AB 2109, and lacking the courage of one’s convictions

It would appear that Dr. Bob Sears, author of The Vaccine Book, is in the news again. Specifically, he’s brought himself back into the spotlight by publishing in that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, a fallacy-filled attack on a bill in California, AB 2109, designed to tighten up the process for […]