Categories
Sports

Yankees lose, Indians win, and Orac is well-pleased

The game ended too late last night, and I was too tired to do a quick celebratory post, but better late than never. In case you were wondering, Orac is pleased.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion

The “Satanic sorcery” of vaccines?

On occasion, I’ve thought of inaugurating awards for the looniest quackery, alternative medicine, or antivaccination craziness of the year. I was thinking of calling them the Woo Awards, but I’ve never actually gotten off my lazy posterior to do the work it would take to set up some sort of voting system, and I’m not […]

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Biology Medicine Science

The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine

No IgNobels here, the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies for a technique that is so incredibly important to modern biomedical research that it’s a wonder they didn’t get the prize before: This year’s Nobel Laureates have made a series of […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

Woo infiltrates one of the premiere trauma hospitals in the U.S.

Regular readers know that I’ve long been dismayed at the increasing infiltration of non-evidence-based “alternative” medical therapies into academic medical centers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). It’s gotten such a foothold that it’s even showing up in the mandatory medical curriculum in at least one medical school. I’ve speculated before that academic medical […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Farrah Fawcett turns to alternative medicine for anal cancer

I’ve had this story sent to me by a few readers over the weekend, and I think it’s worth a brief comment. I’m basically a child of the 1970s. Although I didn’t watch it much, if ever, I remember Charlie’s Angels when I was in junior high and high school. Like any adolescent who came […]