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Humor News of the Weird Skepticism/critical thinking

PETA outdoes itself in sheer insanity

File this under You Can’t Make Stuff Like This Up. Just when I think People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) can’t get any more zany or ridiculous in its never-ending battle against meat eating, it comes up with a gem like sending a request to the jail where a cannibal killer is being […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

How woo can really, really hurt

Pal MD explains it to us using an example.

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Biology Evolution Medicine Science

What was that again about evolution not being relevant to medicine?

It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with creationists trying to claim either that evolutionary theory is not relevant to the problem of microbial resistance to antibiotics or, even worse, making really bad medical recommendations on the basis of their interpretation of evolution. This time around RPM has posted a nice article on Competitive Release […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery Surgery

Dr. Judah Folkman: A true scientific giant has died

Today is a very sad day around my lab. I’ve just been informed that one of my scientific heroes, the man whose work inspired me to enter the research area that I entered, namely tumor angiogenesis, died last night. Yes, sadly, Dr. Judah Folkman reportedly died of a heart attack last night. I had the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Back to the future: When men were men, quacks were quacks, and the FDA was the FDA

Perusing the skeptical medical blogosphere, I came across some rather amusing, but nonetheless informative, videos from the 1950s about medical quackery. There are a number of aspects of these videos that are a bit unsettling to modern viewers, such as the “doctor knows best” paternalism, naïve faith in the AMA and other medical organizations, the […]