Categories
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 […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Reader e-mail: Why are you picking on Jenny McCarthy over vaccines and autism?

Last night, I received an e-mail from a fairly well-known atheist (no, it wasn’t Richard Dawkins, although that would have been totally cool) criticizing me for my post about Bill Maher’s complete unsuitability for the Richard Dawkins Award. I’m not going to reprint my response to that part, because, well, his criticisms were pretty much […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

The spontaneous regression of breast cancer?

I tell ya, I’m on the light blogging schedule for a mere four days, thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the happy invasion of family on Thursday and Friday, and a significant amount of grant writing I’ve had to deal with on Saturday and Sunday, and somehow I missed not only a study relevant to […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

The paradox of screening mammography and breast cancer

If there’s one thing that lay people (and, indeed, many physicians) don’t understand about screening for cancer is that it is anything but a simple matter. Intuitively, it seems that earlier detection should always be better, and it can be. However, as I explained in two lengthy posts last year, such is not always the […]

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 […]