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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Capturing the vibrational woo of youth

It’s been another eventful week on the ol’ blog, staring out with a post on despereate cancer patients self-experimenting with dichloroacetate, continuing on to do another fisking of the anti-evolution neurosurgeon and discussing real individualization of treatments, provided a little basic cancer biology, and ended up with some of the first straight medblogging that I’ve […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

A happy little case

[Note: The following is based on an aggregation of multiple patients. It does not represent any single patient’s case.] It was a little case. I know, I know, I’ve said in the past that there’s no such thing as a little operation, at least not when it’s happening to you, and that’s true. Nonetheless this […]

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Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Dichloroacetate (DCA) and cancer: Magical thinking versus Tumor Biology 101

Late yesterday afternoon, I was lazily checking my referral logs to see who might be linking to Respectful Insolence™, as most bloggers like to do from time to time (and any blogger who claims otherwise is probably feeding you a line), when I noticed a fairly large number of visits coming from one location, namely […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The “individualization” of medical treatments, revisited with evolution

The longer I maintain this blog, the more I find unexpected (to me, at least) intersections and relationships between various topics that I write about. Of course, a lot of it simply has to do with the fact that one of the overarching themes of this blog is skepticism and critical thinking, which leads one […]

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Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The dichloroacetate (DCA) “self-experimentation” phenomenon hits the mainstream media

It figures. Whenever I go away for a conference, things of interest to me that I’d like to blog about start happening fast and furious. Indeed, I could only deal with one of them, and I chose to post my challenge to the Paleyist “intelligent design” creationist surgeon, Dr. William Egnor. Now that I’m back, […]