Free Republic

When Roger Stone announced that his wife, Nydia, had cancer, one had every single right to wonder if Stone was telling the truth. After all, he also asked for donations to help them fight that very same cancer, and Stone was just coming off a year in which he had been found guilty of perjury. Most people might get the benefit of the doubt, it is cancer, after all. Stone… She’s cured! Stone writes “I can honestly say she’s cancer-free…” Does that mean that what he said before wasn’t honest? Just months after the fact. Not only is she cancer-free,...

The career path of Dr. Mehmet Oz is most puzzling. Boasting a fine education (Tower Hill prep; Harvard undergrad; Penn med school; and Wharton), Oz did his residency at New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, and is now an attending surgeon at the same hospital. He also holds various academic appointments at Columbia’s med school. His name appears on more than 150 research papers, and he has published over 20 books—most of which have “You” in the title. Oprah called him “America’s doctor” in 2004, and following more appearances on her program, the TV Queen gave him his own show on...

Away back in March, I predicted that if Obamacare passed, we citizens would eventually foot the bill for homeopathic treatments. This evidence for this forecast was inductive, in two parts. The first was that rumors were had that homeopathic language was written into the bill (yes, in more ways than one). These vague insinuations could not then be pinned down, mostly because the bill was so long that our betters in Congress never bothered to read it to explain it to us. The Senate had also previously meddled with the NIH to force it to pay attention to complimentary treatments....

Homeopathy is "witchcraft" and the National Health Service should not pay for it, the British Medical Association has declared. Hundreds of members of the BMA have passed a motion denouncing the use of the alternative medicine, saying taxpayers should not foot the bill for remedies with no scientific basis to support them. The BMA has previously expressed scepticism about homoeopathy, arguing that the rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence should examine the evidence base and make a definitive ruling about the use of the remedies in the NHS. Now, the annual conference of junior doctors has...

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine was tacked forcibly onto the National Institute of Health after Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) thought more attention ought to be paid to beeswax. As a curative agent, I mean. Those two, and others in charge of us, thought it would a fine idea if we paid to put alternative therapies to the test. And they’re right: it is a good idea. Some potential palliatives can be dismissed immediately—for example, massive doses of arsenic to treat toenail fungus. But most cannot be brushed off without some evidence, because even the...

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

A 16-year-old cancer patient 's legal fight ended in victory Wednesday when his family's attorneys and social services officials reached an agreement that would allow him to forgo chemotherapy. At the start of what was scheduled to be a two-day hearing, Accomack County Circuit Judge Glen A. Tyler announced that both sides had reached a consent decree, which Tyler approved. Under the decree, Starchild Abraham Cherrix, who is battling Hodgkin's disease, will be treated by an oncologist of his choice who is board-certified in radiation therapy and interested in alternative treatments. The family must provide the court updates on Abraham's...