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

Subjecting prisoners to quackery

I’ve at times been asked where I come up with my blogging material. Since I’ve become fairly popular, one major source has been readers sending me stories. I often don’t have time to respond, and most of them don’t interest me enough to be motivated to write, but there are enough that do that I […]

Categories
Bioethics Medicine Politics

Catherine DeAngelis and JAMA: What is going on here?

About a month and a half ago, I happened to be fortunate enough to be able to swing the time to attend a symposium in which Brian Deer (whom anyone reading this blog lately is well familiar with) spoke. It was an opportune time, coming as it did around the time when he had just […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

Does alternative medicine use result in worse outcomes in breast cancer?

Has it really been that long? More than two years ago, I wrote a post entitled Death by Alternative Medicine: Who’s to Blame? The topic of the post was a case report that I had heard while visiting the tumor board of an affiliate of my former cancer center describing a young woman who had […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

If you hand me some stupid, yes, in fact I am going to hit you over the head with it. Because you absolutely deserve it.

Oh, goody! Vox Day wants to play. You remember Vox “Hey, it worked for Hitler” Day,” don’t you? It’s been a long time. In fact, I had to do a search to find the last time I had a run-in with him, and it appears that it’s been about a year since I last noted […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Clinical trials: Where the rubber hits the road for science-based medicine

Until recently, most of my research was laboratory-based. It included cell culture, biochemical assays, molecular biology, and experiments using mouse tumor models. However, one of the reasons that I got both an MD and a PhD was so that I could ultimately test ideas for new treatments on patients and, if I’m good enough and […]