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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The perfect last minute gift for Christmas–woo!

As hard as it is to believe, yet another Christmas is fast approaching. I can feel it in the blogosphere. Heck, I can feel it here on the ol’ blog. Once garrulous commenters here have gone strangely silent for the most part (at least in comparison to their usual prodigious output), and traffic has already […]

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Cancer Medicine Politics

Well, duh: Insured cancer patients do better

Maybe it’s unfair to proclaim this a “well, duh!” study, but its conclusions do seem rather obvious. On the other hand, it’s information that we need in a cold, hard scientific form, and I’m glad that the investigators did it: (AP) — Uninsured cancer patients are nearly twice as likely to die within five years […]

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Announcements Skepticism/critical thinking

The 76th Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle: A dish brush?

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 […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

Enough straw man attacks on evidence-based medicine to defoliate Kansas

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 […]

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History Humor World War II

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 […]