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Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Religion

An embarrassing paean to reiki in The Atlantic

For some inexplicable reason, The Atlantic published an embarrassing paean to the mystical magical woo that is reiki.

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Physics Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The unreality of reiki and distance healing

Well, it’s 2017. In a mere 17 days, unreality will become reality, as the most unlikely and terrifying President in my lifetime is sworn in. Consequently, as I was thinking about what I’d like to write about for my first post of the new year, only one thing came to mind. Only one thing that […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Mouse magic, or How lab mice learned to stop worrying and trust the healing energy

I frequently call homeopathy The One Quackery to Rule Them All, but there are times when I am not so sure that that’s the case. You see, there is…another. I’m referring, of course, to what is referred to as “energy medicine.” What energy medicine modalities have in common is that they postulate that there is […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Reiki propaganda in U.S. News & World Report

Sigh. Just a week ago, I deconstructed an awful article touting how the mass of prescientific quackery known as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as somehow being “validated” by modern science. Specifically, some truly misguided scientists were attempting to use modern systems biology techniques to look for biomarkers associated with TCM diagnoses such as “hot” or […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion

Why reiki masters can’t lose

Regular readers of my not-so-super-secret other blog, where I write under my own name, know that last month Steve Novella and I published a rather nice (if I do say so myself) opinion piece in a peer-reviewed journal about what we called “clinical trials of magic.” In it, we argued that certain alternative medicine modalities […]