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Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics Skepticism/critical thinking

The 21st Century Cures Act passes, potentially turning the FDA into a puppet of the pharmaceutical industry

Well, it’s done. Today, the Senate passed the 21st Century Cures Act, a bill designed to weaken the FDA and empower pharmaceutical companies, sending it to President Obama’s desk. There’s no way Obama won’t sign it, as it contains provisions funding his Precision Medicine Initiative, and he supported it all along. For all its flaws, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The American Academy of Pediatrics gets hard core on vaccine exemptions—finally

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been approximately 16 years since I first discovered that there was such a thing as antivaccinationists. Think of it this way. I was around 37 or so when, while wandering around Usenet (remember Usenet?), I found the newsgroup misc.health.alternative (or m.h.a. for short), a discussion group about, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies Popular culture Quackery

Mike Adams noticed that the Tribeca Film Festival has yanked Andrew Wakefield’s antivaccine film. Hilarity ensues.

I knew it wouldn’t take long. I just knew it. The moment I learned that Robert De Niro had reversed himself and decided to pull Andrew Wakefield’s dishonest antivaccine propaganda “documentary” from his Tribeca Film Festival after having admitted that he was the one who had greased the wheels to get it accepted for screening […]

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Medicine

How is the cell phone-cancer myth like Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th slasher flicks?

There are certain myths that are frustratingly resistant to evidence, science, and reason. Some of these are basically medical conspiracy theories, where someone (industry and/or big pharma and/or physicians and/or the government) has slam-dunk evidence for harm but conspires to keep it from you, the people. For example, despite decades worth of negative studies, the […]

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Clinical trials Medicine Politics Science Skepticism/critical thinking

What if, rather than being too stringent about drug approval, the FDA is not being stringent enough?

All of the candidates being considered by President Trump for FDA Commissioner believe that the FDA is too strict in its standards for approving new drugs. In a commentary in Nature last week, two bioethicists argued that, at least in terms of preclinical data, the standard of evidence is actually too low. Which is correct?