peter lipson
oracknows | May 22, 2016Over the years, I’ve taken care of women with locally advanced breast cancer so advanced that it’s eroded through the skin, forming huge, nasty ulcers filled with stinky dead cancer tissue that’s outgrown its blood supply, leaving the patient in chronic pain. If the patient is fortunate, her cancer has not metastasized beyond her axillary lymph nodes (the lymph nodes under her arm), and her life might still be saved by a combination of chemotherapy, radical surgery, and radiation. If the patient is not fortunate, either the cancer has metastasized and she is doomed or hasn’t metastasized yet…
oracknows | January 3, 2016It always irritates me when I discover a new antivaccine crank in my state; so you can imagine how irritated I become when I discover one right in my very city (OK, metropolitan area). When that happens, it becomes a bit more personal than my usual mission to refute antivaccine misinformation. So I was most alarmed when I discovered just such a beast because a former ScienceBlogs colleague now writing for Forbes, Dr. Peter Lipson, took the time to deconstruct a very ill-informed piece of antivaccine propaganda. The offending post appeared on the blog of a "holistic" physician named Dr. David…
oracknows | March 27, 2013When I wrote about the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) trial last week, little did I suspect that I would be revisiting the topic again so soon. For those of you not familiar with TACT, it was a trial designed to test a favorite quack treatment for cardiovascular disease, chelation therapy. It is, as I have described many times in the past, an incredibly implausible therapy based on a hugely simplistic concept that because calcium accumulates in atherosclerotic lesions, then using chelation therapy could remove the calcium and reduce the lesions. Chelation therapy is a favorite…
amillikan | March 21, 2009
ScienceBloggers Peter Lipson, AKA Dr. Pal from White Coat Underground, and Janet Stemwedel, AKA Dr. Free-Ride from Adventures in Ethics and Science, return for another episode of BhTV's Science Saturday this week. They discuss Senator Tom Harkin's worrisome crusade to "validate" alternative medicine, debate whether scientists should bother to rigorously investigate popular junk science, explain why doctors should exhibit humility in the face of disease, and issue a call for scientists to get political.
Related ScienceBlogs Posts:
Peter on Tom Harkin's war on science
Janet on conventional…