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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics

Dallas Buyers Club-inspired “right to try” laws: Good movies don’t make good policy

One of my favorite shows right now is True Detective, an HBO show in which two cops pursue a serial killer over the course of over 16 years. Starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, it’s an amazingly creepy show, and McConaughey is amazing at playing his character, Rustin Cohle. I’m sad that the show will […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery Religion Science

More Tooth Fairy science studying acupuncture

I must confess, I had a rather rough time yesterday. Actually, it’s been a rough winter, at least as far as my car is concerned. Record amounts of snow and a January much colder than usual have wreaked havoc on the roads around where I live, producing craters that make our roads and freeways look […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Vitamin C for cancer: Trying to rise from the grave once again

There are certain things that can happen that are the equivalent of the Bat Signal to me; that is, if you can swallow the idea of me being in any way like Bruce Wayne. Call them the Cancer Signal, if you will. When I see the Cancer Signal, I know that I have to head […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Politics Quackery

Can Alternative and Conventional Medicine Get Along? No.

If there’s one thing that I write that I don’t feel I repeat too much (although some might disagree), it’s that, unlike other centers and institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), there is not, and never was, a compelling scientific justification for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to exist […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science

Quoth Dean Ornish and NCCAM: Your randomized clinical trials can’t study my CAM!

Practitioners of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) have a love-hate relationship with randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Actually, it’s mostly hate, but they do crave the validation that only randomized clinical trials can provide within the paradigm of evidence-based medicine (EBM). Yes, I intentionally said EBM, rather than science-based medicine (SBM), because, as I’ve described so […]