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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

Six medical “myths” that aren’t

I usually don’t do requests, at least not very often. As selfish as it might sound, I do this blog mainly to amuse myself, which means that I choose whatever topics interest me and write about them. Believe it or not, I’d probably still be doing this even if my readership were 1/100 of what […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

An online summit of quackery

There’s a disturbance in the Force. Well, in the Dark Side of the Force, as in the Quack Side of Medicine. Basically, there’s a rumble in the quackosphere that reached me through three different quack mailing lists that I’m on for the purpose of gathering material for blogging, including–you guessed it–the mailing list of that […]

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Cancer Medicine

Oh, no, antiperspirants cause breast cancer! Well, not really…

As I’ve said before recently, I have mixed emotions regarding Breast Cancer Awareness Month. On the one hand, I look forward to it because it provides us with a pretext to get out science-based messages about breast cancer and to highlight a lot of the cool science that we do at our cancer center. On […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Did Steve Jobs’ flirtation with alternative medicine kill him? (update)

A couple of weeks ago, in the immediate aftermath of Steve Jobs’ death, I took issue with the claims of a skeptic that “alternative medicine killed Steve Jobs.” At the time, I pointed out that, although it was very clear that Steve Jobs did himself no favors by delaying his initial surgery for nine months […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Whither the anti-vaccine movement?

Yesterday, I congratulated that bane of anti-vaccine movement and great vaccine scientist, Dr. Paul Offit, for having been accepted into the Institute of Medicine. It’s a huge honor, and one well-deserved. At the time, I contrasted Dr. Offit, who has ascended to the highest heights of his profession through good science, with Dr. Andrew Wakefield, […]