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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Ebola, "right-to-try," and placebo legislation

One of the biggest medical conspiracy theories for a long time has been that there exist out there all sorts of fantastic cures for cancer and other deadly diseases but you can’t have them because (1) “they” don’t want you to know about them (as I like to call it, the Kevin Trudeau approach) and/or […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

And so it begins: Breast Cancer Awareness Month brings out the cancer quacks

As I mentioned yesterday, here it’s that time of year again: October. Breast Cancer Awareness Month. While the topic of my post then was how antivaccine activists have tried to glom on to the attention that Breast Cancer Awareness Month gets in order to create their fake “awareness month” known as “Vaccine Injury Awareness Month,” […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Dr. Frank Arguello doesn’t much like science-based criticism of his atavistic chemotherapy

As I happened to be out last night at a function for my department, I didn’t have the time necessary to lay out a 2,000 word bit of Insolence. I did, however, have time to note that yet another practitioner unhappy with being criticized over his scientifically questionable treatment, in this case, Dr. Frank Arguello, […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics

USA TODAY flubs it big time over right-to-try laws

I hadn’t expected to write about this topic again so soon, but then I didn’t expect a major newspaper to have written such a boneheaded editorial about it. In a way, I hate to write this post, because USA TODAY did great things once. There, Liz Szabo wrote the single best science-based report on cancer […]

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Biology Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine History Skepticism/critical thinking

Medical marijuana and the new herbalism, part 2: The cult of “cannabis cures cancer”

About five weeks ago a month ago, I finally wrote the post I had been promising to write for months before about medical marijuana. At the time, I also promised that there would be follow-up posts. Like Dug the Dog seeing a squirrel, I kept running into other topics that kept me from revisiting the […]