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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The best woo is breast woo

I realize that I’ve been neglecting my woo. Indeed, yesterday I noticed that it’s been a month and a half since I did a real Friday Dose of Woo. Of course, that particular installation of my long-running blog series (over two and a half years!) was some incredibly powerful woo. In fact, it was titanic, […]

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Anti-Semitism Cancer History Holocaust Medicine World War II

Mrs. Hitler and her doctor

Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

Does alternative medicine use result in worse outcomes in breast cancer?

Has it really been that long? More than two years ago, I wrote a post entitled Death by Alternative Medicine: Who’s to Blame? The topic of the post was a case report that I had heard while visiting the tumor board of an affiliate of my former cancer center describing a young woman who had […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A horrifying breast cancer “testimonial” for “holistic” treatment, part 2

(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer.) Three days ago, I decided to take a look at the scientific literature regarding whether any “alternative” therapies do any good for breast cancer. Not surprisingly, I found no evidence that any such therapy did, with the possible exception of […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A cancer quackery I had never heard of before?

After having blogged about cancer quackery for more than four years and having spent at least five years before that on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative seeing virtually all manner of quackery, cancer and otherwise, I thought I had seen it all. Indeed, I thought that there was no form of cancer quackery that I hadn’t […]