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Complementary and alternative medicine History Medicine

Back to the Golden Age before modern medicine?

So many adherents to “alternative” medicine detest modern medicine, which they see as not being “natural.” In contrast, herbalism, homeopathy, acupuncture, various forms of “energy healing,” are touted as being highly in tune with nature. They’re right about one thing. Throughout the vast majority of human history, humans have relied on unscientific treatments for illness […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine History Humor Medicine Quackery World War II

Hitler discusses the evidence for the chiropractic treatment of infant colic…

Given my long known weak spot for Downfall parodies (even though they are an Internet fad whose time has come and probably already gone), how on earth did I miss this? PodBlack Cat shows me that, believe it or not, Hitler was a chiropractor. He’s been asked to talk about the use of chiropractic for […]

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History Politics World War II

68 years ago today…

…the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, thus finally sucking the United States into the conflagration that had been raging for two years in Europe and even longer in Asia. Stories like this one from the AP remind us that the generation who fought and died to defeat Nazi-ism and Japan’s imperialism is very old and won’t […]

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Announcements Blog housekeeping Blogging History Science

The ScienceBlogs collective teams up with National Geographic

My benevolent overlords at Seed Media Group yesterday announced (to me at least) a surprise new initiative. But, then, I’m always one of the last to find out about these things. In any case, it would appear that we’re teaming up with National Geographic to share blog content and various other initiatives. The press release […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Evolution History Holocaust denial Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The “vindication of all kooks” corollary to the principle of crank magnetism

A couple of years ago, fellow ScienceBlogger Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism Blog coined a most excellent term to describe all manners of pseuodscience, quackery, and crankery. The term, “crank magnetism,” describes the tendency of cranks not to mind it when they see crankery in others. More specifically, it describes how cranks of one variety […]