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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics

“Obama’s fixin’ death panels for your mama”: The USPSTF recommendations for mammography used as a political weapon

As I discussed in detail when I analyzed them, the new USPSTF recommendations for screening mammography for breast cancer have sparked a debate that has degenerated from a scientific and public policy debate into pure emotional rhetoric. When last I visited this topic, yesterday, I had intended it to be my last post for a […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Clinical trials Medicine

Better late than never: The Dunning-Kruger effect meets an incompetent anti-vaccine “analysis”

It never ceases to amaze me just how ignorant of very basic principles of science anti-vaccine activists often are. I mean, seriously. Every time they try to post something, whether they know it or not, they end up making themselves look so very, very stupid–or at least ignorant. The Dunning-Kruger effect takes over, and people […]

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Cancer Medicine Quackery

Does chemotherapy work or not? The “2% gambit”

“CHEMOTHERAPY KILLS!!!!” I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve come across brain-dead statements like the one above, often in all caps on websites resembling that of the Time Cube guy, quite frequently with more than one exclamation point, on the websites of “natural healers,” purveyors of “alternative medicine.” In fact, if you Google “chemotherapy […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

Six medical “myths” that aren’t

I usually don’t do requests, at least not very often. As selfish as it might sound, I do this blog mainly to amuse myself, which means that I choose whatever topics interest me and write about them. Believe it or not, I’d probably still be doing this even if my readership were 1/100 of what […]

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Cancer Medicine

Cancer overdiagnosis and overtreatment revisited

I think the message may finally getting through. That message is that it’s not always the best strategy to treat cancer aggressively. Don’t get me wrong. If I have acute leukemia, I know I’ll need the big guns, every bit of chemotherapy appropriate to the disease that modern oncology can throw at it up to […]