Categories
Cancer Medicine Politics

John McCain: A “crazy cancer-ridden dishonest madman”?

I was disappointed to find an approving link from a fellow ScienceBlogger to this sort of rant by Matt Stoller: We all know that winning this election is not enough. It’s just not. It’s not even close. This is the most unpopular President we’ve ever had and our opponent is a crazy cancer-ridden dishonest madman. […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Antivaccinationists on the measles outbreak: The stupid, it burns thermonuclear

Regarding the recent antivaccinationist-fueled outbreak of measles reported yesterday, quoth J. B. Handley, founder of Generation Rescue, now arguably the most prominent antivaccine activist group in the U.S., given that its coffers are filled with money from celebrity and pro wrestling fundraisers: Autism and antivaccines advocates are unapologetic about the return of measles. “Most parents […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Thanks again, Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield! Thanks again for the measles!

I realize that I’ve thanked Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield before for giving the U.S. the gift of a measles resurgence. Originally, when I started this sarcastic little exercise, I assumed that it would be 5-10 years before we in the States caught up with the level of endemic measles that has been resurgent in […]

Categories
Bioethics Clinical trials Medicine

When clinical trials are designed by the marketing department

I must be slipping. Well, not really. It doesn’t bother me that blog bud and fellow skeptical physician PalMD beat me to an important publication that came out a couple of days ago in the Annals of Internal Medicine. I’m a surgeon and a translational/basic scientist; so Annals is not usually one of the journals […]

Categories
Bioethics Medicine Religion

Do God and prayer trump scientific medicine?

Late this afternoon, I happened to be sitting in my office perusing the websites for the latest batch of surgical journals, trying desperately to catch up on my reading, something that I, like most academic surgeons, am chronically behind in, when I happened upon the website of the Archives of Surgery. There, the lead article […]