Categories
Cancer Clinical trials

Are mouse "avatars" useful for predicting human response to chemotherapy and targeted agents in cancer?

From time to time, I tussle with various animal rights activists online. Over the summer, unfortunately the radical animal rights types, those who think that, at the very least, vandalism is perfectly acceptable in the name of their cause, some of whom think that action up to and including murder of scientists could potentially be […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Can we? (2012 edition)

I sense a disturbance in the skeptical blogosphere. It is something that I half-expected, but, even so, it nonetheless somewhat surprised me when it arrived in the form of comments on my blog and e-mails from readers, fellow supporters of science-based medicine, and others asking me what I thought. In a way, it makes me […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The director and deputy director of NCCAM pontificate about “scientific plausibility”

One of the overarching issues, if not the overarching issue that makes so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM)—or, as it’s now more commonly called, “integrative medicine”—so problematic is prior plausibility. It’s also one of the most difficult to explain to the lay public, because to someone not trained in science it can sound like not […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Medicine Quackery

They say that about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as though it were a bad thing

Why is it after a three day weekend, it always feels as though I have to “catch up”? After all, it’s only one day more than the average weekend, and I didn’t really do anything that different. A little yard work, out to dinner, a bit of grant writing, a bit of chilling, that’s it. […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Naturopathy Quackery

The price of refusing science-based medical and surgical therapy in breast cancer

As a cancer surgeon specializing in breast cancer, I have a particular contempt for cancer quacks. In particular, that contempt smolders and occasionally bursts in to flames right here on this very blog and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere, when I see instances of such quackery applied to women with breast cancer. They are, after […]