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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

If randomized clinical trials don’t show that your woo works, try anthropology!

A common refrain among practitioners and advocates of alternative medicine is that the reason randomized clinical trials frequently fail to find any objective evidence of clinical efficacy for their favorite woo is because, in essence, science is not the right tool to evaluate whether it works. In essence, they either appeal to other ways of […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics Science

Bloviations and pontifications on the state of cancer research, part 2 (of 2)

In rapid succession after the last pontificating and bloviating article claiming that there will never be a cure for cancer because it would be too financially disastrous to the medical economy, I’ve been made aware of another pontificating and bloviating article decrying the state of cancer research today, entitled Curing Cancer: Running on Vapor, Remedy: […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Science Surgery

Bloviations and pontifications on the state of cancer research, part 1 (of 2)

Readers who don’t like me might think that the title of this post refers to what I am about to write. I know, the title perfectly encapsulates the verbose style that is my stock and trade. In reality, though, it’s referring to a couple of articles floating around the blogosphere of which I’ve become aware […]

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Clinical trials Medicine Science

Things like this make medical science worthwhile: A drug to treat genetic diseases due to nonsense mutations

There are times when, as a scientist, I look at an idea and its execution and simply stand in awe. It’s particularly satisfying when it’s a relatively simple idea that could conceivably do a lot of good for a lot of patients. Oddly enough, whether it’s because I’ve been out of the loop or because […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Your tax dollars at work: Tai Chi as an immune booster?

If you ever want to wonder why I’m sometimes of the mind that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine should be disbanded and its functions distributed among the other Institutes of the NIH, you just have to consider the sorts of woo-filled studies (like the Gonzalez protocol) funded by NCCAM mixed in among […]