Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Did cannabis oil save Deryn Blackwell’s life?

In a forthcoming book The Boy in 7 Billion, Callie Blackwell claims that cannabis oil, which she had started giving her son Deryn to relieve his symptoms during a bone marrow transplant for two cancers, actually saved his life when the bone marrow transplant appeared to be failing. Unfortunately, her story appears to be another testimonial that confuses correlation with causation.

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

An as yet unidentified “holistic” practitioner negligently kills a young woman with IV turmeric (yes, intravenous)

Out of southern California, comes a lesson that something as seemingly benign as turmeric can kill when weaponized in the hands of a quack.

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

As feared, Houston cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski (mostly) slithers away from justice again

I’ve been blogging fairly regularly about Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski since 2011, and now the story is over…sort of. Unfortunately, as you will see, the ending is far from ideal. It is, however, somewhat better than I had feared it might be. What I’m referring to, of course, is the final ruling of […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy

Homeopathy for breast cancer surgery? Isn’t it bad enough that the patient has cancer and needs a mastectomy?

I like to refer to homeopathy as The One Quackery To Rule Them All, so much so that I almost always call it that within the first two paragraphs of any post I write about some tasty bit of homeopathy pseudoscience. It’s also a wonderful tool for teaching critical thinking because it’s easy to explain […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

The scam of “detox”: Ritual purification by another name

“You need to detox.” How many times have you heard or read this? Maybe a friend of yours suggested it for the New Year. Maybe you saw it on a website, in a magazine, or as part of an ad. I like to say sometimes, “Toujours les toxines,” because in many branches of alternative medicine […]