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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

A different kind of alternative medicine “testimonial”

I’ve written before about how frequently alties like to point to testimonials as “evidence” that their treatments work. Indeed, from the very beginning, in one of the earliest posts I ever wrote, I explained just why breast cancer testimonials for alternative medicine should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Of course, most of […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The Iron Rule of German New Medicine

No, I’m not talking about “Iron Justice,” a guy who regularly posts to misc.health.alternative and seems obsessed with iron metabolism as the be-all and end-all of health and disease, with a particular affinity for iron overload as the cause of seemingly all disease, although he might make an amusing target at some point in the […]

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Cancer Medicine

Curcumin for cancer?

Abel Pharmboy has posted the second part of his series about the use of botanicals, specifically curcumin, for cancer, and how the altie crowd misrepresents what can be achieved. Basically, the dose of curcumin that would be required to have any effect is so high that, as Abel put it, you’d have to “shovel” it […]

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Cancer Medicine

Why Petri dish studies don’t always translate into benefit for patients

Abel explains, in the first part of a promised series. This is a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time but somehow never got around to it. Abel explains nicely the barriers to drug absorption, distribution, and activity and why it’s very bad science for alties to try to extrapolate from […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Alternative medicine and breast cancer

After the three posts that I recently did about vaccination have garnered well over 250 comments between the three of them (and still counting), I thought it might be time to switch topics. As important as they are, I don’t want this blog to become all vaccines all the time. (After all, look what happened […]