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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A “disinformation campaign” against homeopathy?

Oh goody. Goody, goody, goody, goody, goody. As I sat down to lay down a bit of the old ultrainsolence on a hapless bit of psuedoscience, I was near despair. For whatever reason, there didn’t appear to be anything new out there for me to sink my teeth into. True, when this has happened in […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Orac’s mail bag: Quacks do better than medicine!

We get hate mail. Or I do. True, I don’t get an inordinate amount of hate mail, but I do get some. A lot of the time, it’s rather boring and predictable, which is why I don’t often respond to it on the blog, although sometimes against my better judgment I respond by e-mail. That […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Surveying the “integrative medicine” landscape

Perhaps the biggest bête noire for me is the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers; so whenever I see particularly egregious examples, it gets my fingers twitching over the keyboard, ready to lay down some not-so-Respectful Insolence. So it was last Friday when I happened across an article published nearly two years ago […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

Six medical “myths” that aren’t

I usually don’t do requests, at least not very often. As selfish as it might sound, I do this blog mainly to amuse myself, which means that I choose whatever topics interest me and write about them. Believe it or not, I’d probably still be doing this even if my readership were 1/100 of what […]

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Clinical trials History Homeopathy Medicine

Echoes of Semmelweis

As hard as it is to believe, I’ve been a physician for 23 years now and a fully trained surgeon for over 15 years. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in that time, it’s most doctors really, really don’t like to be told what to do. I don’t know if part of it comes from […]