Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

Cancer research: Playing it safe versus taking risks

If there’s one thing that cancer researchers, indeed most biomedical researchers in the U.S., know today it’s that the research funding climate sucks right now. Indeed, after the completion of the near-doubling of the NIH budget in 2003, during which time it was flying high, the NIH budget in essence crash landed–hard. Paylines, which had […]

Categories
Medicine Surgery

The way to a surgeons heart…

…is through his plush guts, as Liz Ditz tells me: I particularly like the plush pancreas, even though I haven’t done pancreatic surgery on a regular basis since the 1990s. I’m a little confused, though, about why the plush gallbladder is purple instead of green. Surgeons really, really hate to see purple gallbladders, because the […]

Categories
Medicine Personal Surgery

If you knew what you know now…

Hanging out last night, the final night of a three day holiday weekend, I was momentarily at a loss for what to write. For one thing, having spent a good chunk of the last three days unpacking the remaining stuff we’ve had in our basement in boxes for the last six or seven months, my […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

Why the whole “mitochondrial disease plus vaccines = autism” argument is nonsense

Since vaccines seem to be back in the news again, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a fantastic post that I saw the other day over at A Photon in the Darkness. Read it. Read it now. I’ve done fairly long posts about how pseudoscientists and antivaccine advocates are capitalizing on the case […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

A fungus among us in oncology?

I don’t much like Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com (formerly NewsTarget.com). Indeed, I haven’t yet been able to find a more blatant purveyor of the worst kind of quackery and paranoid anti-physician and anti-medicine conspiracy theories anywhere on the Internet, with the possible exception of Whale.to. However, Whale.to is so utterly, outrageously, incoherently full of not […]