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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Friday Woo Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Feedback loops, reproductive cells, cancer, and design

It is with some trepidation that I approach the latest target of Your Friday Dose of Woo. No, it’s not because the woo is so potent that it has actually struck the fear of You-Know-Who in me (I leave it up to readers to determine whether I was referring to God or Valdemort), although it […]

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Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery

Checking in with The DCA Site

It’s been a week since I last wrote about dichloroacetate (DCA), the chemotherapeutic agent that targets tumor cells by an interesting new mechanism based on the Warburg effect, as I’ve described in the past. After a very interesting article in Cancer Cell in January by investigators at the University of Alberta, the blogosphere erupted with […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Woo infiltrates the U.K. undergraduate curriculum…

I’ve lamented time and time again how woo has been infiltrating American medical schools, even going so far as to find its way into being totally integrated into mandatory curriculum from the very first term of the first year of medical school at Georgetown. I realize I’m a bit late on this one, but sadly […]

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Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Abraham’s law: Bad medicine has made bad law

There hasn’t been much news in the last two or three months about Abraham Cherrix, the 16-year-old with Hodgkin’s lymphoma who rejected conventional chemotherapy, first in favor of the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy and then for the ministrations of a radiation oncologist in Mississippi named Dr. Arnold Smith, who combines non-woo (low dose radiation […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Humor Medicine Quackery

Reasons to run, not walk, from a Reiki practitioner

Regular readers will know my opinion of Reiki or “energy healing.” No need to rehash it here, at least not at the moment. But if you’re a believer and looking for a Reiki practitioner, Reiki Blogger has some suggestions for you of things that “are NOT OK” in a first Reiki session: I recently read […]