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Complementary and alternative medicine Popular culture Quackery Science

The CEO of Aetna embraces quackery

Everyone hates health insurance companies. At least, so it seems. Personally, I’ve had my issues with such companies myself, particularly when having to deal with them when they refuse to cover certain medical tests for my patients. Fortunately for me, surgical oncology is a specialty that doesn’t have a lot of tests or treatments that […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Television

A counterpoint to Jenny McCarthy’s autism narrative

There was a time when I used to blog about Jenny McCarthy a lot. The reason, of course, is that a few years ago, beginning in around 2007, she seized the title of face of the antivaccine movement in America through her “advocacy” for her son Evan, whom she described as having been made autistic […]

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

It’s 2014, and Stanislaw Burzynski has begun his counteroffensive

Well, that didn’t take long. I knew it had been too quiet on the Burzynski front. In retrospect, that was almost certainly because of the holidays, but the holidays are over, and real life is here again. Yes, the year 2014 is only a little more than a week old, and here comes Stanislaw Burzynski […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

A fungus among us in oncology? (2014 edition)

One of the more bizarre bits of cancer quackery that I’ve come across is that of an Italian doctor (who, like many cancer quacks, appears not to be a board-certified oncologist) named Tullio Simoncini, who claims that cancer is really a fungus and has even written a book about it, entitled, appropriately enough for this […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Quackery

Why are antivaccinationists so at home with Libertarianism?

Rats. Everyone’s blogging about all the studies showing (as if it needed to be shown yet again) that vitamin supplementation is not necessary for most people, nor does it decrease the risk of heart disease or cancer, and I can’t, at least not yet. Why not? Because my friggin’ university doesn’t subscribe to the Annals […]