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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

HuffPost Health: A soon-to-be one-stop shop for quackery?

Oh, goody. Just what we need. Some of my readers sent this to me yesterday, and I, like them, was appalled. Apparently that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, has decided that it’s starting a “real” health section (to be, apparently, distinguished from its old “Lifestyle” section, where previously most of its […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

On the magical prevention of pancreatic cancer

I don’t know how I missed this article. I really don’t. It’s over a week old, and it’s exactly the sort of irritating cancer quackery that normally draws me irresistibly to it to slather it in a heapin’ helpin’ of not-so-Respectful Insolence. After all, being a cancer surgeon and all, I really, really hate cancer […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

“Natural” versus CAM “natural”

NOTE: I was on a lovely vacation for three days in Chicago over the weekend, where I visited old haunts. (Bathroom attendants? At one of my favorite pub hangouts when I lived in Lincoln Park, John Barleycorn? Handing out crappy brown paper towels? Plastering the walls there with endless rows of flat screen TVs turned […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The complexity of cancer, part II: Enter the quacks

A couple of days ago, I couldn’t resist discussing a recent article in the New York Times about recent discoveries in cancer research. I considered the article to be a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. While the article did a pretty good job of describing recent discoveries about how noncoding RNA, […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

When “personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy” really means “making it up as you go along”

Last week, I applied a little not-so-Respectful Insolence to a movie about a physician and “researcher” named Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, founder of the Burzynski Clinic and Burzynski Research Institute in Houston. I refer you to my original smackdown for details, but in brief Dr. Burzynski claimed in the 1970s to have made a major […]