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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

AOL buys The Huffington Post and a quack sees an opportunity

Things are pretty hairy this week, what with a couple of grant deadlines fast approaching, not to mention a rather important site visit at my institution later this week. As a result, I had been intending to post a “rerun” today, but then I saw something that just cracked me up so much that I […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Gotta have more woo in my medical school, 2011 edition

Four years ago, I wrote a post that I called Gotta have more woo in my medical school! In it, I discussed how UCSF had put out a woo-ful, non-science-based booklet about “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), full of references to qi, acupuncture, and all manner of woo. Since then I’ve been sounding the alarm […]

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Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Progress mixed with hype in personalized medicine

“Personalized medicine.” You’ve probably heard the term. It’s a bit of a buzzword these days and refers to a vision of future medicine in which therapies are much more tightly tailored to individual patients than they currently are. That’s not to say that as physicians we haven’t practiced personalized medicine before; certainly we have. However […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science

Dr. Andrew Weil versus evidence-based medicine

Let’s face it, Dr. Andrew Weil is a rock star in the “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) and “integrative medicine” (IM) movement. He is one of its founders, at least a founder of the its most modern iteration, and I am hard-pressed to think of anyone who did more in the early days of the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Special pleading for “integrative oncology”

I don’t recall how many times I’ve said lately that I detest the term “integrative medicine.” As I’ve pointed out time and time again, it’s the preferred “successor,” if you will, to the term “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) (at least among the woo-friendly). After all, as I’ve pointed out before, it just won’t do […]