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Biology Clinical trials Medicine Politics Science

The UCLA Pro-Test Rally: Researchers stand up to animal rights terrorism

Better late than never, given that DrugMonkey has already been all over this. Unfortunately, there was another serious outbreak of antivaccine idiocy over at HuffPo that I felt I had to deal with before this: Embedded video from CNN Video It was a great day indeed. For far too long, animal rights terrorists have intimidated […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Medicine

The AMA investigates Catherine DeAngelis and JAMA

Last week, there was a bit of a scandal of sorts over an editorial published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which I blogged about in a rather long post. The short version is that a flawed study that tested using Lexapro that neglected to report a rather important comparison that would […]

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

If you hand me some stupid, yes, in fact I am going to hit you over the head with it. Because you absolutely deserve it.

Oh, goody! Vox Day wants to play. You remember Vox “Hey, it worked for Hitler” Day,” don’t you? It’s been a long time. In fact, I had to do a search to find the last time I had a run-in with him, and it appears that it’s been about a year since I last noted […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Religion

Religion and end-of-life care

Given that I’m the proverbial lapsed Catholic cum agnostic, religion just doesn’t play that large a role in my life and hasn’t since around six years ago. I don’t know if I’ll ever discuss or explain on this blog what the last straw resulting in that transformation was (it’s too personal), but a couple of […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The justification for NCCAM: “What can be done to generate a better placebo?”

It’s probably an understatement to say that I’ve been critical of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Indeed, I consider it not only to be a boondoggle that wastes the taxpayers’ money funding pseudoscience, but a key promoter of quackery. Worse, its promotion of highly implausible (one might even say magical) modalities […]