Tag Archives: medicine

Wikipedia Won’t Let People Post Woo On Wikipedia, And That Makes Woo Promoters Upset

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, responds to alternative medicine woo pushers seeking easier criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia articles:

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Harvard Med Students on What the Spleen Does

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How Doctors Die: A Great Follow-Up Essay to a Great Essay

Dr. Ken Murray has offered a follow-up essay providing some statistical support for his claim that doctors really do die differently from the rest of us (that is, they tend to “go gentle into that good night”). Here’s a taste: … Continue reading

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H5N1: The Airborne Experiment Cannot Be Kept Secret

More bad news on the H5N1 airborne experiment front (from the Los Angeles Times yesterday): [Dutch virologist Ron] Fouchier [whose lab created airborne H5N1] said he was cooperating [with the US government], but he thought the [experiment sharing] strategy was impractical. When he … Continue reading

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H5N1: A Threat to Human Civilization in 2012?

It’s hard to imagine a nervier end-of-the-year story. H5N1 is a highly virulent strain of bird flu. If it ever went aerosol, transmitting itself between humans through coughing or sneezing, it would probably kill a billion people before a vaccine got … Continue reading

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No Matter How You Supplement, Cosmo, You’re Still Going to Die

A little reminder, from Ronald Bailey at Reason magazine, that there continues to be no evidence that vitamin supplementation improves health or increases longevity. Here’s his summary of two recent medical studies: One finding is that men in the prostate cancer study who took … Continue reading

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Doctors, Jeopardy, and Computers

When I was recently watching online NOVA’s Smartest Machine on Earth—an exceptionally fascinating documentary on the IBM computer that defeated the two most accomplished (human) Jeopardy players in the game show’s history—it occurred to me that it won’t be long before … Continue reading

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Alternative Medicine Does Not Exist; Critical Thinking Does

Andrew Sullivan recently got a letter from an epidemiology doctoral student offering some rules-of-thumb for thinking about medical claims and treatments. The advice is so sensible, and so nicely representative of good critical thinking, that I post them here: 1. Ancient wisdom is the … Continue reading

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Taking your medicine science free

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Health Care Reform: The Republican Party’s Waterloo

Here’s what health care reform means: stabilizing for millions of Americans one of the verities of human existence (illness), and without ballooning deficits. This is how the Democrats are about to drive the Republican Party into irrelevancy, by delivering the goods. And I … Continue reading

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Christopher Hitchens deconstructs the Ten Commandments—and offers an alternative decalogue of his own

I much prefer Hitchens to Moses—except perhaps when Moses arrives in this form:

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A Compelling Statistic and Two Leading Experts in Virology Who Say: Get. Your. Flu. Shot.

If you’re a lay person, I don’t know how much more clearly the case for getting your seasonal flu, swine flu, and pneumonia shots can be made than this: a compelling statistical correlation and quotes from two leading experts. Here’s … Continue reading

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