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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

Chris beat cancer? He did indeed, but it wasn’t quackery that cured him

Chris Wark is a young man who was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer in 2003 at age 26. He underwent appropriate surgery for his cancer but declined adjuvant chemotherapy in favor of quackery. Now promotes his testimonial, in which he tries to convince people that it was the quackery, rather than the surgery, that cured him. He even claims that surgery alone can’t cure stage 3 colon cancer, which is just plain wrong. Yes, Chris beat cancer, but it was the surgery, not the quackery, that did it.

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Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The court intervenes to save a child with cancer, and Mike Adams loses his mind over it

One type of story that I’ve fairly frequently commented upon since the very beginning of this blog is the story of children or teens with cancer whose parents decide to pursue quackery instead of effective therapy or children with other serious diseases whose parents reject effective therapy for them. Think way, way back to Katie […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Cancer chemotherapy and obesity

In medicine, particularly oncology, it’s often the little things that matter. Sometimes, however, the “little things” aren’t actually little; they just seem that way. I was reminded of this by a story that was circulating a couple of weeks ago in the national media, often under titles like “Obese cancer patients often shorted on chemo […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Quackery

Quackery of a different kind than I usually write about, part 2

About a week and a half ago, I wrote about a local oncologist who was arrested by the FBI for massive Medicare fraud in which physician involved diagnosed cancers that weren’t there, gave chemotherapy to patients who either didn’t have cancer or were in remission and thus didn’t need it, and had developed a self-referral […]

Categories
Cancer Medicine Politics Quackery

Quackery of a different kind than I usually write about

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog discussing failures of the medical system. Usually, such discussions occur in the context of how unscientific practices and even outright quackery have managed to infiltrate what should be science=based medicine (SBM) in the form of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine,” in which […]