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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Finding money for biomedical research by getting rid of woo

In the wake of President Obama’s election, there was a great deal of hope that he would take science-based medicine seriously and, as he promised in his inaugural speech, “restore science to its rightful place.” Shortly before Obama’s inauguration, in fact, Steve Salzberg proposed that the Obama administration should defund the National Center for Complementary […]

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Cancer Medicine Quackery

Natural Cancer Treatments That Work: A wretched hive of scum and quackery

Back in the 1990s when I first dipped my toe into the pool that was Usenet, that massive, wild, and untamed frontier where most online discussion occurred before the rise of the web and later the blogosphere, I was truly a naif. I had no idea–no inkling–of the depths of quackery to which people would […]

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Cancer Medicine

Cancer overdiagnosis and overtreatment revisited

I think the message may finally getting through. That message is that it’s not always the best strategy to treat cancer aggressively. Don’t get me wrong. If I have acute leukemia, I know I’ll need the big guns, every bit of chemotherapy appropriate to the disease that modern oncology can throw at it up to […]

Categories
Biology Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Physics Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Dr. Robert Lanza and “biocentrism”: Time to get out the paper bag again

I don’t know if I need to get out the infamous paper bag or–even worse–the Doctor Doom mask out yet. As you may recall (if you are a long time reader, anyway) is that the mind-numbing stupidity of certain MDs has driven me to want to hide my face in utter shame at the embarrassment […]

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Biology Cancer Clinical trials Evolution Medicine Science

The Human Genome Project: Hype meets reality

I’ve had the immense good fortune to have trained and ultimately become a physician-scientist during a time when the pace of discovery and the paradigm changes in science have occurred just over the course of my career in medicine and science has been staggering. microRNA, the shift from single gene studies to genomics, the development […]