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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion

For shame! Oprah Winfrey shills for faith healer John of God

In terms of promoting woo and quackery, there is one person who stands head and shoulders above all the rest. True, she doesn’t just promote woo and quackery, but she does have a long list of dubious achievements in that realm, including but not limited to unleashing Jenny McCarthy and her anti-vaccine crusade plus Suzanne […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

On the magical prevention of pancreatic cancer

I don’t know how I missed this article. I really don’t. It’s over a week old, and it’s exactly the sort of irritating cancer quackery that normally draws me irresistibly to it to slather it in a heapin’ helpin’ of not-so-Respectful Insolence. After all, being a cancer surgeon and all, I really, really hate cancer […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Personal

Requiem for a friend I’ve never met

I didn’t feel much like blogging last night, but I felt as though I had to, even if it’s brief. Yesterday was one of those crappy days where there were a lot of problems that didn’t relent, so much so that I was completely occupied and didn’t check my e-mail until the evening. It was […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Integrating patient experience into research and clinical medicine: Will this lead to true “personalized medicine”?

I advocate science-based medicine (SBM) on this blog. However, from time to time, consider it necessary to point out that SBM is not the same thing as turning medicine into a science. Rather, I argue that what we do as clinicians should be based in science. Contrary to what some might claim, this is not […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience

Battling misinformed consent: How should we respond to the anti-vaccine movement?

Antivaxers frequently claim that they are champions of “informed consent.” In reality, their version of informed consent is a parody of consent that I like to refer to as “misinformed consent.”