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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics

The USPSTF mammography guidelines and African American women: Do they even apply?

A while back I wrote about really rethinking how we screen for breast cancer using mammography. Basically, the USPSTF, an independent panel of physicians and health experts that makes nonbinding recommendations for the government on various health issues, reevaluated the evidence for routine screening mammography and concluded that for women at normal risk for breast […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Blog housekeeping Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Music Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Five years

Has it really been that long? It was a dismally overcast Saturday five years ago when, on a whim after having read a TIME Magazine article about how 2004 was supposedly the Year of the Blogger, I sat down in front of my computer, found Blogspot, and the first incarnation of Respectful Insolence was born. […]

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Cancer Medicine Politics Surgery

How not to protect your medical turf

When the USPSTF issued new guidelines for who should undergo screening mammography, at what ages, and how often, it set off a firestorm of negative reactions. Some of this is not surprising, given that the reevaluation of the evidence for screening mammography led the USPSTF to recommend against its routine use in women between the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine News of the Weird Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking Surgery

A pyromaniac in a field of straw man or a black hole of burning stupid incinerating every straw man in the universe? Mike Adams attacks skepticism

Mike Adams is confused. I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn’t have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there […]

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Medicine Religion

An uncomfortable question

Work called last night. (It happens.) Basically, I had two deadlines for two big things (finishing reviewing the grants assigned to me for study section and a major writeup for a project for my job). Unfortunately, both of them were today. I realized as I perused old posts that I hadn’t reposted this one in […]