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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery

Your Friday Dose of Woo: An iPod of woo

Alright, now they’ve gone too far. I can take a lot from woo-meisters. I can watch them claim that water has some sort of “memory” and that diluting a compound to nonexistence somehow seemingly by magic makes it more powerful and chuckle at their silliness. I can listen to them claim that by “alkalinizing your […]

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Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Update on Katie Wernecke

Things have been very quiet as far as the story of Katie Wernecke, the 14-year-old girl with lymphoma whose parents fought a legal battle with the State of Texas to be able to choose “alternative” therapy involving high dose vitamin C, despite the fact that her conventional therapeutic options had not been exhausted and she […]

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Bioethics Cancer Medicine

Dubious benefits versus profits in chemotherapy

At the monthly faculty meeting of our cancer center the other day, we had just finished listening to an invited talk by an ethicist about medical technology and the ethics of end-of-life care, when one of my colleagues happened to mention an article in the New York Times about how a perverse incentive system encourages […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

So he’s not just a bad actor, but he’s a woo-meister as well

Is your qi weak? Is your aura not glowing as brightly and colorfully as it should? Is your ability to take on ten masked men who conveniently come at you no more than one or two at a time getting shaky, so that you’re no longer sure that you can handle more than, say, five […]

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Entertainment/culture Science Television

R.I.P., Mr. Wizard

Via Boing-Boing, I learn that Don Herbert, a.k.a. “Mr. Wizard,” has died. He lived to a ripe old age of 89. Perhaps the best tribute to him is this: “Over the years, Don has been personally responsible for more people going into the sciences than any other single person in this country,” George Tressel, a […]