Every year, for lack of timely screening and treatment, hundreds of women will die of breast cancer. No, I’m not talking about the change in mammography screening guidelines for women aged 40-49. I’m talking about women of any age who will not have access to mammography o… Read full post »

There has been much righteous indignation expressed in response to the new US Preventive Services Task Force changes that no longer recommend routine mammograms for women aged 40-49. The indignation takes two basic forms. The first is the assertion that it is worth any amount of mone… Read full post »

When I heard about the US Preventive Services Task Force mammography recommendations issued on November 16, I had two thoughts. The first was that these recommendations are old, not new, but people keep ignoring them for political reasons. The second was that the Republicans would ex… Read full post »

Americans, particularly American women, are shocked, bewildered and angered over the change in mammography guidelines. Many emphasize that it is changes like these that foster distrust in the medical system and lead people to seek alternative practitioners. That’s unfortunate b… Read full post »

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Consensus Development Conference on Breast Cancer Screening for Women Aged 40-49 … concluded that data on the benefits and risks of screening mammography for women aged 40 through 49 are sufficiently mixed that informed decision making… Read full post »

What would you think if the package insert for your new medication said the following?

Our company, Drugs4All has tested this medication in 20,000 people and collected copious data about its effects. But we made a promise to Drugs4All shareholders that we will not let… Read full post »

Everyone has heard about women faking orgasm, but most people assume that men would never do so, and that it is impossible in any case.

A new study in the Journal of Sex Research aims to over turn the conventional wisdom. Men’s and Women’s Reports of… Read full post »

President Obama believes that the primary goal of healthcare reform is to provide access to the millions of Americans who currently have no health insurance. Dr. Andrew Weil, writing in the Huffington Post (The Wrong Diagnosis), thinks he knows better, as the title of his article imp… Read full post »

Believers in pseudoscience appear to suffer from a free floating fear. What unites vaccine rejectionsists, organic food devotees, and consumers of “alternative” health? They are united by a pervasive fear of being poisoned. And not poisoned accidentally, either. They are… Read full post »

This is embarrassing.

My state is home to the mother church of Christian Science, officially Church of Science, Christ. In what must be considered one of the more bizarre examples of political pork, my state’s Senators, the late Ted Kennedy and John Kerry,… Read full post »

The new CDC report on infant mortality, Behind International Rankings of Infant Mortality: How the United States Compares with Europe, is an object example of how to deceive with statistics. It purports to be a detailed investigation of infant mortality, but it inexplicably fails to… Read full post »

It sounds like a horror story made up by an anti-abortion group, but it is not. Neocutis, a Swiss “cosmeceutical,” is being marketed as a “Bio-restorative Skin Cream with PSP™” for “sensitive, stressed and irritated skin.” PSP are processed s… Read full post »

Vaccine rejectionism, like most of “alternative” health finds its adherents among those who know very little immunology, virology or statistics. There’s no solution for that besides education in those disciplines. But there is another aspect to vaccine rejecti… Read full post »

What does it mean to be educated in a particular discipline? Whether that discipline is architecture, anthropology, or law, being educated generally means years of study, thousands of hours of experience, and intimate acquaintance with the specialist literature.

Medicine is like that,… Read full post »

Vaccinations have been around for over 200 years and vaccine rejectionists have been around for nearly that long. Over the years, the basis for claims of harm from vaccines have changed, but one factor has remained constant. Vaccine rejectionists have never been right. The current fe… Read full post »

We are currently in the midst of an epidemic. No, not the H1N1 epidemic, though that’s the most immediate threat. What threatens the long-term health of our nation, particularly our nation’s children, is an accelerating epidemic of ignorance. Vaccine rejectionism, the fla… Read full post »

We survived almost all of human history without it. Yet in the last 100 years people have allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by a huge corporate conspiracy into believing that we “need” their products. They cite studies and claim we don’t understand science; they i… Read full post »

The mainstream media, including otherwise reliable websites like The Huffington Post, is saturated with "alternative" medical quackery presented as news. There is no theory too outrageous or unsupported to merit media attention particularly if the purveyor is a celebrity of some sort… Read full post »

 This has got to be the greatest fundraising slogan of all time. That’s one of many superlatives that can be applied to an amazing organization, funded by the strangest source, engaged in a most poignant quest.

The organization is Clitoraid and the name was chosen… Read full post »

I’m dismayed to discover that I apparently wasted 8 years in medical training. Four years of medical school and four years of residency were over-kill (pardon the expression). It seems that in 2009 the most important requirement for a medical authority is to be a former B… Read full post »

Doctors have understood for some time that it was inevitable. The American Cancer Society acknowledged today that cancer screening has been oversold.

It seems like every day you read in the newspaper that what was standard medical care yesterday is now no longer… Read full post »

Feminist scholar Michele Crossley's recent paper in the journal Feminism Psychology raises important questions about breastfeeding, and by extension, about unmedicated childbirth. Breastfeeding as a Moral Imperative: An Autoethnographic Study makes a controversial claim:

...[F]ar fr… Read full post »

I blog in a variety of places with a variety of different audiences, but I am struck by the uniformity of the arguments of vaccine rejectionists. It’s not surprising, though, when you consider that they are not reaching their conclusions independently, but rather regurgitating… Read full post »

Sometimes the best way to understand a situation is to see a graphical representation of it.

Below is a graph of pediatric influenza deaths over the past 4 years. I have adapted it from a graph created by the CDC that can be found here. The graph shows the number/… Read full post »

Coincidentally two different people decided to upbraid me at the same time. Susanne Freeborn, commenting on “How do vaccines work?” writes:

No matter how medically correct you may be in what you are saying, and I am certain you are correct quite a lot of the… Read full post »