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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

An Ontario court dooms a First Nations girl with cancer: Who’s to blame?

I figured that yesterday’s post about the First Nations girl in Ontario with lymphoblastic leukemia whose parents stopped her chemotherapy in favor of “traditional” medicine would stir up a bit of controversy, and so it did, albeit much more at my not-so-super-secret other blog, which featured an expanded version of this post. Don’t worry, you […]

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

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Naturopathy and “bioresonance”

It’s been a long and entertaining week. Well, at least part of the week was entertaining. After all, it was hard not to be mightily amused at what happened when Dr. Mehmet Oz, known to the world as America’s Doctor but to skeptics as America’s Quack, asked his Twitter followers to ask him anything under […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Catholic doctors and priests versus the tetanus vaccine in Kenya

Of the many lies and myths about vaccines that stubbornly persist despite all evidence showing them not only to be untrue but to be risibly, pseudoscientifically untrue, among whose number are myths that vaccines cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, and a syndrome that so resembles shaken baby syndrome (more correctly called abusive head trauma) […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Humor Medicine Naturopathy Popular culture Quackery Television

America’s quack Dr. Oz asks people to ask him questions on Twitter. Hilariously, the results aren’t quite what he expected.

Getting old sucks. I had a relatively long and busy day in the operating room yesterday, the kind of day that not so long ago I’d handle with no problem. This time around, though, it wiped me out, to the point where not long after dinner I crashed. Hard. Then I woke up around midnight […]

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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 […]