Since its very inception, the Huffington Post has been a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. Shortly after that, antivaccine woo-meisters like David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kimg Stagliano, and, apparently, one of the editors (Special Projects Editor Rachel Sklar) were joined by all-purpose woo-meisters like Deepak Chopra. True, for a brief period of time there appeared to be an occasional voice for vaccines on HuffPo, but they never lasted. After all, RFK, Jr.'s been there nearly four years now and David Kirby almost as long, while pro-vaccine commentary pops up briefly, gets shouted down by…

Well, there's something new. After nearly four years, I don't recall having seen a Skeptics' Circle meeting quite like this one before. The 108th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle has landed at Podblack Cat, and it's a doozy. In fact, it's a video podcast. Be sure to go and check it out. Next up is The Lay Scientist on April 9. Start getting your skeptical wheels spinning and get more of that great skeptical blogging ready in time to make another great Skeptics' Circle.

Because of my stands against dubious medical "therapies" and outright quackery and for science- and evidence-based medicine, I have been the frequent target of what I've come to call the "pharma shill gambit." It's a pretty stupid and common ad hominem attack in which the attacker, virtually always an advocate of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) tries to smear those of us who argue against pseudoscience and for science-based medicine as being hopelessly in the pocket of big pharma to the point where we make the statements we do because we're "shills" for the drug companies.…

(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer.) Three days ago, I decided to take a look at the scientific literature regarding whether any "alternative" therapies do any good for breast cancer. Not surprisingly, I found no evidence that any such therapy did, with the possible exception of melatonin, which there is no reason to label "alternative," given that it was discovered through science and is being tested using science. At the same time, I've been keeping an eye on the usual suspects pushing various forms of woo for breast cancer,…

I've at times been asked where I come up with my blogging material. Since I've become fairly popular, one major source has been readers sending me stories. I often don't have time to respond, and most of them don't interest me enough to be motivated to write, but there are enough that do that I consider my readers to be a major source of material. Then there are medical and surgical journals, as well as sources like EurekaAlert! Then there are my numerous RSS feeds that I peruse on a daily or every-other-day basis in the evening or early in the morning. Then, of course, there are the various…

Ha! PZ isn't the only person who gets wingnut comments. I get 'em too, and yesterday I got a doozy from a guy named Keith Dunlop in response to my post about a homepath bringing his quackery to poor AIDS patients in Africa: THE MAIN POST ABOVE IS FROM A DRUG COMPANY MASQUERADING AS CONCERNED SCIENCE. THIS IS NON OTHER THAN AN ATTEMPT BY THE DIRTY TRICKS DEPARTMENT OF A DRUGS COMPANY TO MINIMIZE RESEARCH INTO ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF TREATING THIS PHENOMENA FOR THE SAKE OF EVIL AND PURE PROFIT. MR SHERR HAS BEEN HOUNDED, VILIFIED, THREATENED, FOLLOWED AND COWED BY THE BIG PHARMA FRONT PEOPLE WHO…

About a month and a half ago, I happened to be fortunate enough to be able to swing the time to attend a symposium in which Brian Deer (whom anyone reading this blog lately is well familiar with) spoke. It was an opportune time, coming as it did around the time when he had just published his new blockbuster story about how Andrew Wakefield, architect of the MMR vaccine scare in the U.K., had apparently falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that started it all. The symposium was entitled Science, the Media and Responsibility for Child Health: Lessons Learned from the MMR Vaccine,…

I usually do this over the weekend before, but better late than never, right? In any case, the 108th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching. In fact, it's a mere two and a half days away! This time around, it will land in the very capable hands of Podblack Cat on Thursday, March 26. As always, the guidelines for submissions can be found here, while the host-specific contact information for this week can be found here. Don't let a feline down; send her your best stuff by Wednesday. Also, as always, hosts are needed. I'd very much like to fill out the summer schedule within the…

Has it really been that long? More than two years ago, I wrote a post entitled Death by Alternative Medicine: Who's to Blame? The topic of the post was a case report that I had heard while visiting the tumor board of an affiliate of my former cancer center describing a young woman who had rejected conventional therapy for an eminently treatable breast cancer and then returned two or three years later with a large, nasty tumor that was much more difficult to treat and possibly metastatic to the bone, which, if ture, would have made it no longer even possibly curable. My discussion centered on…

A few weeks ago, having fallen asleep on the couch watching TV, I awoke to an ad for a most wondrous product. Well, not exactly. In fact the product, known as a Snuggie, left my scratching my head. Three questions came to mind: Who on earth is too stupid to use a blanket? Who on earth would buy a product that makes them look either like a complete dork, or a monk with a fuzzie robe? Would anyone actually go out in public with such a thing? That's why, on a Sunday when my brain's too fried to write anything about science (or even that coherent), I was happy to see the cheap and quick blog…

Normally, I'm not much into LOLCats, but this one is so spot-on for this blog: All too true, alas.

This is about as geeky as it gets, but since a couple of the genes I study are homeobox genes, one of which is a HOX gene, one of which is not, I found this hilarious: There you go: All you need to know about homeobox genes if you're not an expert in them. Hat tip to Bioephemera.

Oh, goody! Vox Day wants to play. You remember Vox "Hey, it worked for Hitler" Day," don't you? It's been a long time. In fact, I had to do a search to find the last time I had a run-in with him, and it appears that it's been about a year since I last noted him mindlessly parroting antivaccinationist myths and spouting his usual misogyny. Alas, Vox has been a regular irritant to this blog since very early on, when he didn't like my likening his views towards women to the Taliban for his arguing that women shouldn't be allowed to vote because they are "fascists at heart." Since then, every so…

I've been on a bit of a tear criticizing the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). One of the reasons is because, as I've said time and time again, there is no logical organizational or scientific reason why the potpourri of disparate, often unrelated, and often mutually contradictory therapies that fall under the rubric of CAM should have its own Center at the National Institutes of Health. Yesterday, blog bud Abel Pharmboy posted a very good explanation on why. Money quote: CAM is a terrible term. It is NOT medicine. Modalities proven to work are medicine.…

Given that I'm the proverbial lapsed Catholic cum agnostic, religion just doesn't play that large a role in my life and hasn't since around six years ago. I don't know if I'll ever discuss or explain on this blog what the last straw resulting in that transformation was (it's too personal), but a couple of years ago I did go through a period where I became hostile to religion, perhaps spurred on by PZ and the whole anti-religion gestalt of the ScienceBlogs Collective here. That lasted maybe a year or two, during which time I did what every new disillusioned ex-religious person seems to do (…

Two days ago, I deconstructed Andrew Wakefield's clumsy attack on Brian Deer, the investigative journalist whose investigations uncovered Wakefield's massive conflicts of interest and, most recently, his scientific fraud. Now, right here in the very comments of this blog, Brian Deer has responded: Obviously, because Our Andy's statement purports to be a complaint to the UK Press Complaints Commission, I can't yet comment on the substance (although I have mentioned just a couple of generic Wakefield claims right up at the top, here: http://briandeer.com/solved/wakefield-veracity.htm). But, in…

It's probably an understatement to say that I've been critical of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Indeed, I consider it not only to be a boondoggle that wastes the taxpayers' money funding pseudoscience, but a key promoter of quackery. Worse, its promotion of highly implausible (one might even say magical) modalities gives these modalities a patina of scientific respectability that they do not deserve, especially given that, even under the most favorable conditions possible, they routinely fail to demonstrate any efficacy above and beyond that of a…

Yet another reason why I love The Onion: Because giant, highly intelligent, acid-spitting crabs pose no danger to society. Of course, certain antivaccine advocates seem to think that this parody has something to do with vaccines, which just goes to show how far down the rabbit hole they've gone when they think that a parody like this speaks to the truth of their cause. It also reveals a bit of their mentality in that they so easily liken life-saving vaccines to giant, acid-spitting, highly intelligent crabs.

Until recently, most of my research was laboratory-based. It included cell culture, biochemical assays, molecular biology, and experiments using mouse tumor models. However, one of the reasons that I got both an MD and a PhD was so that I could ultimately test ideas for new treatments on patients and, if I'm good enough and lucky enough, ultimately improve the care for cancer patients. If there's one thing, though, that I've learned in my nearly nine years in academic surgery, it's that far fewer patients end up enrolled on clinical trials than are eligible to participate in them. Every…

By way of badscience.net: Speak it, brother Ben! Oh, and don't be too hard on your hairstyle and clothing in that one. I could totally picture you as an incarnation of The Doctor in that getup. That sweater vest does look a bit Peter Davison-ish, although the curly locks do rather echo Tom Baker.