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Clinical trials Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking Surgery

Do negative clinical trials change practice?

One of the central themes of this blog from the very beginning is that all medicine, regardless of where it comes from or how it was developed, should be held to a single science-based standard with regards to efficacy, effectiveness, and safety. I tend to focus primarily on “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), now more […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

A Scottish doctor endorses Robert O. Young’s “pH Miracle Living”

I didn’t think I’d be revisiting this topic so quickly. However, given that I’m at TAM and I don’t have a lot of time to do one of my usual 2,000 word epics for a change, I thought that this story, which popped up the other day while I was traveling was at least worth […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine History Holocaust denial Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

How “they” view “us” (2014 edition)

A week ago or so, I was perusing my Google Alerts, along with various blogs and news websites, looking for something to blog about, when I noticed a disturbance in the pseudoscience Force. It’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed many times before from a wide variety of cranks and quacks, but it all boils down to […]

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Medicine

Uncertainty versus certainty in the mammography wars

As I write this, I am winging my way home from the 2014 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR, Twitter hashtag #AACR14) in San Diego. (OK, I’m revising this to fit the format and, of course, the Insolence of this particular blog. Shockingly, I didn’t have as much time to blog in […]

Categories
Medicine Politics Popular culture Science

Is "value-based' health insurance really "value-based" or is it just an excuse to make patients pay more?

And now for something completely different… Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to find new woo-filled claims or dangerous, evidence-lacking trends to write about. Heck, I did it just last week. Examining certain other health-related issues from a science-based perspective is more difficult, but I feel obligated to do it from time to time, not just […]