Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

When popularity outpaces science in surgery

In science- and evidence-based medicine, the evaluation of surgical procedures represents a unique challenge that is qualitatively different from the challenges in medical specialties. Perhaps the most daunting of these challenges is that it is often either logistically impossible or unethical to do the gold-standard clinical trial, a double-blind, randomized placebo trial, to test the […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Why aren’t there more clinical trials studying the effect of CAM on cancer?” cries the CAM advocate

I’ve lamented time and time again just how much money the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) wastes on basic research and clinical trials of modalities that are, from a scientific viewpoint, so highly implausible that the chances of finding a clinically useful or relevant–or even a consistent statistically significant–effect (for example, homeopathy […]

Categories
Medicine Politics Religion Science

Science leads you to killing people? Not that nonsense again!

That’s the message that Ben Stein has been pushing lately, namely not just the hated “Darwinism” but science itself inevitably leads to political philosophies such as Nazi-ism and Stalinism (but especially Nazi-ism, given its emphasis on racial hygiene and eugenics), including the mass murder that resulted from them. As a result, Stein has been correctly […]

Categories
Anti-Semitism Biology History Hitler Zombie Holocaust Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking World War II

Ben Stein and Jack Chick, two more crappy tastes that taste crappy together

Does anyone remember a few months ago, when I wrote about Ben Stein? No? Here, then, I’ll jog your memory. Ben Stein and his involvment in that piece of cinematic excrement Expelled! “inspired” me to–if you’ll excuse the term–resurrect a certain recurring character from the very early days of this blog. Yes, I’m talking about […]

Categories
Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking Surgery

Animal rights terrorism advocate Dr. Jerry Vlasak: Murder of animal researchers is “morally acceptable”

I may have joked a bit about certain surgeons whom, because they say such dumb, pseudoscientific things with alarming regularity, I consider embarrassments to the noble profession that is surgery. Usually, it’s been surgeons who reveal an astonishing ignorance of the science of evolution as they parrot long discredited and debunked canards about evolution while […]