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

This must not come to pass: Quacks winning the Shorty Award for health

Although I have a Twitter account, I really don’t use it all that often, other than having set up an automatic feed to Tweet all my new posts for the blog. True, I do from time to time have flurries of activity (usually when I’m trapped in a particularly boring conference) or am inspired to […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Arm & Hammer Baking Soda for H1N1 influenza and cancer? Woo at its finest!

There are times when I get really depressed writing this blog. It’s not because I don’t enjoy it, although like any long term hobby my blogging does occasionally feel like more of an obligation than a hobby. That’s only part of the time, though. Most of the time I really do enjoy what I do. […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery Surgery

Mammography and the risk of breast cancer from low dose radiation: Weighing the risks versus hysteria

I’m beginning to understand why evolutionary biologists are so sensitive about how creationists abuse and twist any research that they think can be used to cast doubt upon evolution. Whenever there is research that changes the way we look at evolution or suggest aspects of it that we didn’t appreciate before, where scientists get excited […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Evolution History Holocaust denial Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The “vindication of all kooks” corollary to the principle of crank magnetism

A couple of years ago, fellow ScienceBlogger Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism Blog coined a most excellent term to describe all manners of pseuodscience, quackery, and crankery. The term, “crank magnetism,” describes the tendency of cranks not to mind it when they see crankery in others. More specifically, it describes how cranks of one variety […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Rethinking cancer screening?

Here we go again. I see that the kerfuffle over screening for cancer has erupted again to the point where it’s found its way out of the rarified air of specialty journals to general medical journals and hence into the mainstream press. This is something that seems to pop up every so often, much to […]