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Cancer Medicine Politics

The costs and benefits of the latest, greatest cancer drugs

I’m currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I’ll even be on a panel! While I’m gone, I’ll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I’m away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I’ll be reposting some Classic Insolence […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Senator Tom Harkin’s and Representative Darrell Issa’s war on medical science

In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall (a.k.a. The SkepDoc) likes to call “tooth fairy science,” where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Quackery

The “success” of NCCAM grants on homeopathy

One of the great benefits of having been a blogger for nearly eight years now is that I now have a rich history of thousands of posts. True, there are the occasional posts that I wish I hadn’t written and even the occasional post that I consider to be not particularly good, but for the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

A board certification in woo is born?

I’ve been harshly critical of the entire concept of “integrative medicine” (IM), which has over the last few years nearly supplanted the former term used for non-science-based medicine or medicine based on prescientific ideas represented as though it were scientific medicine, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM). Indeed, just last month I pointed out how IM […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Using language to achieve the appearance of legitimacy for quacks

The whole concept of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) and “integrative medicine” (IM), the former of which “complements” science-based medicine with quackery and the latter of which “integrates” pseudoscience-based with science-based medicine. The reason I start out by saying this is to emphasize that CAM/IM is all about using language to persuade that pseudoscience is […]