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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Sayer Ji: Willfully misunderstanding overdiagnosis and misdiagnosis since…forever

If there’s one lesson that I like to emphasize while laying down my near-daily dose of Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful, it’s that practicing medicine and surgery is complicated. Part of the reason that it’s complicated is that for many diseases our understanding is incomplete, meaning that physicians have to apply existing science to their […]

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Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Functional medicine (FM) quackery dissected in the mainstream media

Functional medicine (FM) is “make it up as you go along” quackery that combines the “worst of both worlds,” namely the overtesting and overtreatment that can plague conventional medicine plus the quackery “integrated” into “integrative medicine.” It’s rare to see a mainstream outlet get it right about FM, but an Irish journalist pulls it off.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Popular culture Pseudoscience

Autism prevalence increases, and antivaxers blame it on vaccines (2018 edition)

As it does every two years, the CDC has issued its 2018 report on autism prevalence. As in years past, autism prevalence has ticked upward. As in years past, antivaxers have tried to blame it on vaccines. As in years past, they’re wrong. Vaccines are not responsible for increased autism prevalence.

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Once more into the breach: The American Cancer Society publishes new mammography guidelines

One of the things that feels the weirdest about having done the same job, having been in the same specialty, for a longer and longer time is that you frequently feel, as the late, great Yogi Berra would have put it, déjà vu all over again. This is particularly true in science and medicine, where […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Science

How should we treat stage 0 breast cancer?

I’ve written more times than I can remember about the phenomenon of overdiagnosis and the phenomenon that is linked at the hip with it, overtreatment. Overdiagnosis is a problem that arises when large populations of asymptomatic, apparently healthy people are screened for a disease or a condition, the idea being that catching the disease at […]