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Medicine Surgery

Well, I’m glad they finally found a good use for stem cell therapy

It figures, it really does, that this would have to be one of the first clinical uses of stem cells that they’d come up with. The really weird thing about this article is its schizophrenic nature. It starts out with a sensationalistic description of the new use of stem cells, and then it describes the […]

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Friday Woo Medicine Paranormal Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The Color of Woo (Green, Of Course!)

Like most people, I like making money. True, it’s not the main goal of my life (otherwise I definitely wouldn’t be in academics), but, all in all, it’s better to be comfortably off than to be poor. And, as I’ve said before, although I could make more in private practice, I don’t do too badly […]

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Evolution Medicine Science

Medicine and Evolution, Part 7: The theory that dare not speak its name?

I’ve written quite a bit about the role of the theory of evolution in medicine, including how it can be used to better understand disease processes such as cancer and sleeping sickness. I’ve also lamented the woeful state of knowledge about evolution that is possessed by all too many medical students and physicians, most recently […]

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Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics

Drug safety versus a “Constitutional right” to access to experimental drugs

[Note: There is a followup to this post here.] I’ve been writing a lot about dichloroacetate (DCA) lately, perhaps even to the point of becoming repetitive and risking boring my readers. Fortunately, this post is not primarily about DCA. Unfortunately, it’s about a question that is related to the recent hype over DCA in that […]

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Humor Medicine Politics

Everything I know about the dangers of drugs and alcohol I learned from the comics

Every so often, just for laughs or my own personal edification, periodically I check my referral logs to see who’s linking to me and what posts are being linked to. Most of the time, there’s not much there worth commenting on. Sometimes, it’s bloggers who agree with me; other times, it’s bloggers who were simply […]