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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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Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

More links on dichloroacetate (DCA) and cancer for your edification

Although I’ve been blogging alot about dichloroacetate, the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent that has shown promise against a variety of cancers in preclinical animal tumor models, but I’m not the only one. Fellow ScienceBlogger Abel Pharmboy, whose knowledge of pharmacology surpasses my own, has also been on the case and has produced some articles worth […]

Categories
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 […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science

Rubbing it in: Woo not “sweating to the NIH payline”

Last week, I wrote a quick and (semi-) facetious piece about how my colleague and I are sweating to the NIH payline, as we wait to find out whether our R01 application will be funded or not. With its being rumored that National Cancer Institute (NCI) paylines will be in the range of the 12th […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

The deadly deviousness of the cancer cell, or how dichloroacetate (DCA) might fail

One byproduct of blogging that I had never anticipated when I started is how it sometimes gets me interested in scientific questions that I would never have paid much attention to before or looked into other than superficially. One such scientific question is whether dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule that was shown to have significant […]