Farid Fata

Forgive me, dear readers. Ever since Mike Adams, the crank who runs and “alternative health” empire and a website with as much traffic as the NIH website, started targeting me two months ago with a series of libelous posts, I haven’t mentioned him much, for the simple reason that I don’t want to drive any traffic his way. Also, after his having posted 25(!) articles targeting me over the last two months, the most recent just this weekend, I realized that addressing him directly is too much like wrestling a pig in mud. You get dirty, and the pig likes it. However, yesterday, Adams outdid…

About a week and a half ago, I wrote about a local oncologist who was arrested by the FBI for massive Medicare fraud in which physician involved diagnosed cancers that weren't there, gave chemotherapy to patients who either didn't have cancer or were in remission and thus didn't need it, and had developed a self-referral system to his own imaging facility. The story of this oncologist, Dr. Farid Fata, founder of a very large multi-location oncology practice (Michigan Hematology Oncology), made international news, which is exactly not the sort of coverage Detroit needs right now, given all the…

I've spent a lot of time on this blog discussing failures of the medical system. Usually, such discussions occur in the context of how unscientific practices and even outright quackery have managed to infiltrate what should be science=based medicine (SBM) in the form of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine," in which the quackery of alternative medicine is "integrated" with SBM. However, as big a problem as the infiltration of unscientific CAM practices into medicine is, there is a threat at least as grave here in the U.S. (and, I presume, in many…