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Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Here we go again: More radiation for Starchild Abraham Cherrix

I’ve written extensively before about Starchild Abraham Cherrix, the (now) 17-year-old who was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease when he was 15 and who, after one course of chemotherapy, refused any further evidence-based medicine in favor of the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy. His refusal led to a big legal battle in Virginia, and the court […]

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Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Update on Katie Wernecke

Things have been very quiet as far as the story of Katie Wernecke, the 14-year-old girl with lymphoma whose parents fought a legal battle with the State of Texas to be able to choose “alternative” therapy involving high dose vitamin C, despite the fact that her conventional therapeutic options had not been exhausted and she […]

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Bioethics Cancer Medicine

Dubious benefits versus profits in chemotherapy

At the monthly faculty meeting of our cancer center the other day, we had just finished listening to an invited talk by an ethicist about medical technology and the ethics of end-of-life care, when one of my colleagues happened to mention an article in the New York Times about how a perverse incentive system encourages […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

The ASCO Meeting: The swag!

Dedicated advocate of evidence-based medicine that I am, I am sometimes labeled by those who do not understand skepticism as a “shill” for big pharma. Of course, such accusations are simply the logical fallacy known as poisoning the well, in which the credulous engage in preemptive ad hominem attacks designed to associate me with the […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Acid, base, or woo (revisited)

As we continue our countdown to having reached one full year of woo (namely, the one year anniversary of Your Friday Dose of Woo), it’s occurred to me that there’s one form of woo that I’ve dealt with before, but haven’t revisited. It’s a bit of woo that’s so monumentally silly that it’s hard to […]