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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery

So chemotherapy does work, after all (revisited)

If there’s one medical treatment that proponents of “alternative medicine” love to hate, it’s chemotherapy. Rants against “poisoning” are a regular staple on “alternative health” websites, usually coupled with insinuations or outright accusations that the only reason oncologists administer chemotherapy is because of the “cancer industrial complex” in which big pharma profits massively from selling […]

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Announcements Blog housekeeping Blogging Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Science fiction/fantasy Skepticism/critical thinking

Eight years

As I mentioned yesterday, Orac is currently away at an undisclosed location that is someplace warm. He is there, taking a rare pre-solstice break, preparing for the Mayan apocalypse that is to come on the 21st of this month. (Actually, he’s recharging his Tarial cell, the better to be prepared for the utter nonsense that […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Sweet and alkaline won’t win the war against cancer

I write about cancer quackery a lot, and I’ve been at it for over a decade. I first cut my teeth on Usenet, delving into that cesspit of unreason known as misc.health. alternative, where my eyes were opened to just the sorts of pseudoscientific and unscientific cancer treatments patients are enticed into trying, sometimes in […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

Claiming to be able to cure cancer with magic water

I’ve written about naturopathy many times before. The reasons that it interests me are several. First, it amazes me how anyone “discipline” (if you want to call it that) can encompass so many forms of quackery, some of which are mutually contradictory. (For instance, how can homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine both be true?) Also, […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

Quoth Joe Mercola: I love me some Burzynski antineoplastons

As I contemplated how I wanted to start the blogging week, I thought that I should probably again plug Bob Blaskiewicz’s campaign to provide Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston doctor who for the last 35 years has been treating patients diagnosed with advanced stage and terminal cancers with something he calls antineoplastons (ANPs), with a […]