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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

Revisiting the question of “individualization” of treatments in “alternative” medicine

I kind of miss Peter Lipson on ScienceBlogs and wish he were still around. I realize it’s been nearly a year and a half since he departed, but it’s been a bit lonely here being the only physician blogging about quackery, the role of science in medicine, and other skeptical topics related to medicine. This […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Quackademic Medicine at Jefferson University Hospitals

I detest the term “integrative medicine,” which is what promoters of “alternative medicine” pivoted to call “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) when they decided that they needed to lose the word “alternative” altogether. After all, no longer were CAM practitioners content to have their favorite quackery be “complementary” to real medicine because “complementary” implied a […]

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Autism Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Luc Montagnier: The Nobel disease strikes again

They call it the Nobel disease. Linus Pauling is the prototypical example. A brilliant chemist who won two Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, in his later years Pauling became convinced that high dose vitamin C was a highly effective treatment for cancer and the common cold and, expanding upon that, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion

Quoth Richard Dawkins: “I am proud to have presented the [AAI] award to Bill Maher”

It just so happens that I was up quite late last night doing–what else?–writing yet another grant application (well, two actually). Even though the grants aren’t due until Wednesday, Tuesday happens to be my operating room day, meaning I need to get this done and buried by tomorrow afternoon at the latest. In any case, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Bernadine Healy: Flirting with the anti-vaccine movement

There’s an old saying, so old that it’s devolved into cliché: Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it. I’m sure the vast majority of my readers, if not every last one of them, have heard this saying before. Certainly, it has a lot of truth to it. Sometimes it even applies […]