Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Better late than never: The Swedish mammography study and screening for women under 50

Last week blew by me in a blur. Because I was in full grant writing frenzy to get an R01 in the can by Friday, pretty much anything that wasn’t totally urgent got shoved aside, at least after Wednesday. Of course, it was last Wednesday that yet another mammography study was being touted as a […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Dammit! Where’s my thimerosal?

As I mentioned earlier this morning, I went to get my annual flu vaccine. It’s the least I can do to protect myself and to protect the immunosuppressed patients around me in a major cancer center. I was looking forward to cheekily asking the nurse administering the vaccine to make sure mine had thimerosal, but […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Off to get my flu vaccine…

It’s about time. My cancer center is finally offering the flu vaccine for its employees, and I’m off to go and get it. I’ll be sure to ask for extra thimerosal. Even though Jock Doubleday’s challenge seems to have disappeared, I’ll still do it in his honor. This year, I’m particularly proud of my cancer […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science

Mark Hyman deceives about “science research deception”

One of the favorite fallacious arguments favored by pseudoscientists and denialists of science is the ever infamous “science was wrong before” gambit, wherein it is argued that, because science is not perfect or because scientists are not perfect, then science is not to be trusted. We’ve seen it many times before. Indeed, we saw it […]

Categories
Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Science

The Guatemala syphilis experiment, human subjects research abuses, and CAM

If there’s one thing that burns me about so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) clinical trials, it’s how unethical many of them are. This is particularly true for trials that test modalities that, on the basic science grounds alone, can be dismissed as so highly implausible and with such a low prior probability of success […]