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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking Uncategorized

We’ve heard this story before: Raising loads of cash for unproven treatments

Being a cancer surgeon, I realize that my tendency is to view my blogging material through the prism of cancer, particularly breast cancer, my specialty. it’s easy to forget that there are diseases every bit as horrible, some arguably even more so than the worst cancer. When I think of such diseases, it’s not surprising […]

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Clinical trials Surgery

Placebo effects in surgery

Although I’m a translational researcher, I’m also a surgeon. That was my first and primary training and only later did I decide to get my PhD during my residency, when the opportunity to do so with a decent stipend presented itself. From my perspective, clinical research in surgery is difficult, arguably more difficult than it […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Dr. Josephine Briggs needs your help! NCCAM needs a new name!

Pretty much everyone who’s gotten through junior high recognizes the line from the William Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet says, “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, retain that dear perfection which he owes […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Earn CME credits for attending an autism quackfest!

Well, it snuck up on me again, the way it has a tendency to do every year. Maybe it’s because Memorial Day is so early this year. Maybe it’s because there’s just so much work to do this week given the multiple grant deadlines. Whatever the case, it just dawned on my last night that […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine History Holocaust Medicine Quackery

The “Health Ranger” Mike Adams engages in legal thuggery against a critic

I hadn’t really planned on writing again about everyone’s favorite conspiracy theorist and promoter of quackery, Mike Adams, at least not so soon after the last time I did it, which was only last week after Adams appeared on Dr. Oz’s daytime television show to push his “laboratory.” Adams, as you might recall, goes by […]