Categories
Pareidolia Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

Some Christmas pareidolia

Everyone knows how much I live pareidolia. It never ceases to amaze me how the human mind can impose imagery on everyday things. We’ve seen Jesus on toast, on sheet metal, in rocks, on trees, and in windows. We’ve seen the Virgin Mary on a similar bunch of things–even a Lava lamp or a freeway […]

Categories
Biology Clinical trials Evolution Medicine Physics Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Is the “decline effect” really so mysterious?

NOTE: Orac was actually out rather late last night. It turns out that the more administrative responsibility he somehow seems to find the more he has to go out to dinner as a part of various cancer center-related functions. As a result, he is recycling a bit of recent material from elsewhere that he in […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Stem cell quackery for autism, revisited

There are multiple recurring messages on this blog that have evolved over the years, but, if there’s one of them that has been consistent since the very beginning, it’s been about the inherent unreliability of single person testimonials. I wrote about this very topic virtually at the inception of this blog in a post that […]

Categories
Clinical trials Humor Medicine

Sadly, this is not too far from the truth for my basic science colleagues…

It’s times like these that I’m glad I’m a clinician-scientist: Or maybe not. The reason is that the same conversation in a clinician-scientist’s review would be asking why he’s only produced X number of RVUs last year and suggesting pointedly that he needs to double his RVU output. Oh, and, by the way, he needs […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The revenge of the return of the resurrection of the “autism as mitochondrial disorder” notion

If you need some woo, and you need it fast, who ya gonna call? HuffPo! Yes, as I’ve pointed out since its very inception, if there’s one thing The Huffington Post is good at doing, it’s butchering medical science and serving up regular heapin’ helpings of the purest woo. Be it the anti-vaccine pseudoscience that […]