Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A ghoul descends upon Christina Applegate’s “maimed” body

This is getting to be nauseatingly frequent. As my blog bud Mark Hoofnagle pointed out, the hard-core “alternative medicine” mavens, in particular that despicable promoter of quackery and distrust of scientific medicine who runs one of the two or three largest repositories of antiscience and quackery in existence, Mike Adams, seem to have decided that […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The nuttiness that is Whale.to: Save Scopie’s Law!

Some of you may have heard of John Scudamore’s Whale.to site. I’ve referred to it in the past as a repository of some of the wildest and most bizarre “alternative” medicine claims out there. However, I will admit that I’ve only ever scratched the surface of the insanity that is Whale.to. Kathleen Seidel has dug […]

Categories
Cancer Medicine Surgery

More is not always better: MRI and the increasing mastectomy rate

“Early detection of cancer saves lives.” How many times have you heard this statement or something resembling it? It’s a common assumption (indeed, a seemingly common sense assumption) that detecting cancer early is always a Very Good Thing. Why wouldn’t it be, after all? For many cancers, such as breast cancer and colon cancer, there’s […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

On the enormous variability of cancer behavior

Perhaps one of the most common misconceptions held about cancer among lay people is that it is one disease. We often hear non-physicians talk about “curing cancer” as though it were a single disease. Sometimes, we even hear physicians, who should know better, using the same sort of fuzzy thinking and language about “curing cancer” […]

Categories
Cancer Medicine Surgery

Don’t annoy the radiologist…

…or so says #1 Dinosaur, who was buried under a blizzard of radiology reports. I tend to agree up to a point, but the only problem from my perspective is this: Until recently, it was not at all uncommon for me to get seemingly millions of copies of every radiology report for mammography, ultrasound, and […]