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Medicine

Choosing Wisely when it comes to medicine

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Basically, overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of a condition that, if left untreated, would very likely never cause the patient harm. Because I’m a cancer surgeon, I’ve almost always written about overdiagnosis in the context of–you guessed it–cancer, particularly breast cancer. In breast cancer, for […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics

No, Virginia, cancer care in Europe doesn’t suck, contrary to what a recent paper implies

The U.S. is widely known to have the highest health care expenditures per capita in the world, and not just by a little, but by a lot. I’m not going to go into the reasons for this so much, other than to point out that how to rein in these costs has long been the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science fiction/fantasy Skepticism/critical thinking

Now there’s some “anti-science”…

I’m sometimes criticized for referring to various people who are “anti-science” as, well, “anti-science.” People, for whatever reason, have a hard time believing that anyone is anti-science; so when I point out how much, for example, antivaccinationists, alternative medicine believers, or creationists are anti-science, they have a had time believing it. This is particularly true […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Help me Obi-Wan. You’re my only hope.

In the year and a half or so that I’ve been doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I must admit that I’ve come across some truly weird stuff. Stuff so weird that, after reading it, you wonder either, “How on earth could someone seriously think something like this is true or would work?” or “How […]

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Cancer Medicine Surgery

Don’t annoy the radiologist…

…or so says #1 Dinosaur, who was buried under a blizzard of radiology reports. I tend to agree up to a point, but the only problem from my perspective is this: Until recently, it was not at all uncommon for me to get seemingly millions of copies of every radiology report for mammography, ultrasound, and […]