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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Yet another acupuncture meta-analysis: Garbage in, garbage out

Ever since I started paying attention to it, acupuncture has, at least until recently, inspired ambivalence more than anything else in me. As a skeptic and science-based physician, I found it very easy to dismiss utter quackery like homeopathy or the various “energy healing” modalities, such as reiki or therapeutic touch strictly on the science […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Biology Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

“Germany, we have a problem…” Or: Should anything be done about two bad apples of pseudoscience on the tree of ScienceBlogs.de?

Well, it looks as though I’ve stepped into it yet one more time. Believe it or not, I hadn’t intended to stir up trouble among the ScienceBlogs collective, both English- and German-speaking. Really. Oh, I’ll admit that there are occasionally times when I actually do mean to stir up trouble. One recent example is when […]

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Politics

Anti-blasphemy = anti-free speech

Chalk this up under “Yet another example of U.N. incompetence“: UNITED NATIONS – Islamic countries Monday won United Nations backing for an anti-blasphemy measure Canada and other Western critics say risks being used to limit freedom of speech. Combating Defamation of Religions passed 85-50 with 42 abstentions in a key UN General Assembly committee, and […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

The spontaneous regression of breast cancer?

I tell ya, I’m on the light blogging schedule for a mere four days, thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the happy invasion of family on Thursday and Friday, and a significant amount of grant writing I’ve had to deal with on Saturday and Sunday, and somehow I missed not only a study relevant to […]