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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Popular culture Surgery

Suzanne Somers “grew a new breast” with stem cells plus fat transfer? Not so fast…

Suzanne Somers is back in the news, claiming that she “grew a new breast” with stem cells and fat transfer. But did she? Did she really? A careful look at what’s public about her story suggests nothing other than a bit of self-promotion during Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Categories
Bioethics Clinical trials Medicine Politics

As I predicted, the exploitation of desperate patients using right-to-try begins

I warned you. I’ve been warning you for four years. Now that a federal right-to-try law has passed, the profiteering has begun. Let patients beware!

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

How is it that in 2018 cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski is still preying on desperate cancer patients?

In the 1970s, young polish expat and cancer researcher Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski thought he had found a cure for many incurable cancers. He dubbed it antineoplastons (ANPs_. Unfortunately, he left the path of science and started treating patients before he had evidence that ANPs work. Four decades later, without ever having published compelling evidence for anticancer efficacy of ANPs, he’s still luring desperate patients to his clinic. Now he’s set to branch out to quack clinics in Mexico. Why can’t the law stop him?

Categories
Clinical trials Medicine Politics Popular culture

The cruel sham that is “right-to-try” will be up for a vote in the House tomorrow

It’s finally happened. A “right-to-try” bill is coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives. It’s been slightly modified from the version that passed the Senate last year to make it less patient-hostile, but it’s still the same cruel sham that right-to-try has always been.

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

The Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health: Exaggerating the evidence for acupuncture to make it appear to be more than an elaborate placebo

The Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health is a group dedicated to promoting “integrative medicine” in medical academia that has, unfortunately, been very successful over the last two decades. Recently, it published a report that promotes acupuncture as a tool to combat the opioid epidemic Let’s just put it this way. The ACIMH exaggerates the evidence rather obviously.