Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

GAPS in a doctor’s reasoning about vaccines and autism

As hard as it is to believe, I’ve been blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense and autism quackery since early 2005. Before that, I had been a regular on the misc.health.alternative newsgroup, where I had also encountered anti-vaccine pseudoscience, but the topic had not been a top priority for me. In fact, when I started this blog […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Vaccination for H1N1 “swine” flu: Do The Atlantic, Shannon Brownlee, and Jeanne Lenzer matter?

I had meant to address this topic last week, but the whole Suzanne Somers thing bubbled up and overwhelmed my blogging attention. Regular readers of this blog probably realize that I tend to live and die as a blogger by the maxim that if some is good more must be better. So I clobbered the […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Cancer prevention drugs, supplements, and a false dichotomy

The New York Times has been periodically running a series about the “40 years’ war” on cancer, with most articles by Gina Kolata. I’ve touched on this series before, liking some parts of it, while others not so much. In particular, I criticized an article one article that I thought to be so misguided about […]

Categories
Cancer Medicine

“Obama’s fixin’ death panels for your mama,” the misogyny gambit, and other idiotic responses to the updated USPSTF mammography recommendations

I knew when I first heard about them that the new United States Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations on breast cancer screening would be controversial. I tried to discuss these guidelines and the issues involved in a calm and rational way, relatively devoid of Insolence, Respectful or not-so-Respectful, yesterday, pointing out that screening guidelines […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Arm & Hammer Baking Soda for H1N1 influenza and cancer? Woo at its finest!

There are times when I get really depressed writing this blog. It’s not because I don’t enjoy it, although like any long term hobby my blogging does occasionally feel like more of an obligation than a hobby. That’s only part of the time, though. Most of the time I really do enjoy what I do. […]