Categories
Cancer Medicine Surgery

Media medicine actually gets it right for a change

Granted, it is the print media, rather than the bubble-headed TV doctors that I railed against a couple of days ago, but even so I had a hard time believing this article in the Washington Post when it was forwarded to me. Compare: Washington Post article Part 1 and Part 2 of Early Detection of […]

Categories
Cancer Medicine Politics

Overdiagnosis of breast cancer due to mammography

Screening for disease, especially cancer, is a real bitch. I was reminded of this by the publication of a study in BMJ the very day of the Science-Based Medicine Conference a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, between The Amaz!ng Meeting and other activities, I was too busy to give this study the attention it […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Reader e-mail: Why are you picking on Jenny McCarthy over vaccines and autism?

Last night, I received an e-mail from a fairly well-known atheist (no, it wasn’t Richard Dawkins, although that would have been totally cool) criticizing me for my post about Bill Maher’s complete unsuitability for the Richard Dawkins Award. I’m not going to reprint my response to that part, because, well, his criticisms were pretty much […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

Pertussis outbreaks and vaccine effectiveness

About a month ago, I deconstructed a typically dishonest and deceitful attempt by that Overlord of Quackery on the Internet (in my opinion, of course), Joe Mercola, to claim that the acellular pertussis vaccine doesn’t work. It was a typical Mercola bit of prestidigitation that, as so much antivaccine propaganda does, took a grain of […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Blogging Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Does all this blogging about quackery really accomplish anything?

Believe it or not, after nearly eight years blogging and around five years before that cutting my skeptical teeth on that vast and wild (and now mostly deserted and fallow) wilderness that was Usenet, I have occasionally wondered whether what I’m doing is worthwhile. Sometime around 1998, after I first discovered Holocaust denial on Usenet, […]