As regular readers of the Skeptics’ Circle know, hosts are usually given pretty wide latitude about how they handle the presentation of the posts. This time around, host Martin Rundkvist, who’s hosted an excellent edition before (albeit with a puzzling theme), decides that a large dish brush is just the thing for the 76th Meeting […]
Month: December 2007
Evidence-based medicine is not perfect. There, I’ve said it. Like anything else humans do in science or any other endeavor, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has its strengths and its weaknesses. On the whole, I consider it to be potentially vastly superior to the way that medicine was practiced in the past, bringing a systematic, scientific rigor […]
Churchill or Hitler?
You can probably manage to tell a Picasso from a Monet. But can you do the same for Churchill and Hitler? Inquiring minds want to know. The website’s Swiss, and it’s written in German, but you should be able to figure it out. Just click on one of the four painting to get started and […]
I used to be of the opinion that there might just be something to acupuncture. No, I never thought there was anything to the notion that acupuncture “works” by somehow rerouting the flow of a magical life force (qi) that no scientific instrument can detect and that no practitioner of acupuncture (or other practioners “healing […]
If you listen to what advocates of homeopathy, acupuncture, or whatever form of so-called “alternative” medicine you can think of (in reality, non-evidence-based medicine for the most part), you’d think that physicians are in the pockets of Big Pharma, hopeless slaves to its propaganda, addicted to its tchotchkes and swag. Sadly for Big Pharma, they […]