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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

6 New Age cures that are (mostly) as full of crap as you think

Sometimes you find good skepticism in strange places. One example of this has been Cracked.com. Normally, Cracked.com is a humor site based on the magazine that I used to read sometimes back in 1970s. Unfortunately, the magazine folded several years ago, but the website lives on. For example, Cracked.com once did a snarky article making […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

A school board president abuses his position to promote an antivaccine movie

A science-based blogger’s work is never done, apparently. I’ll show you what I mean in a minute. But first, I just have to make a simple observation. Pseudoscience, be it quackery, evolution denial, denial of anthropogenic global warming, antivaccine nonsense, or other forms of pseudoscience, apparently never dies. No matter how many times it’s slapped […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Patient satisfaction versus quality of care, round two

About a month ago, I wrote about a study that looked at metrics of patient satisfaction and compared them to hard outcomes often used to evaluate quality of care, including frequency of emergency room usage, frequency of hospitalization, and overall mortality. Even though these days there appears to be an implicit assumption that increased patient […]

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Autism Medicine Quackery

Camel’s milk: The cure-all that cures autism, too?

The Autism File bills itself as a magazine dealing with all aspects of autism. In reality, it’s basically a crank magazine dedicated to autism biomedical quackery plus a generous helping of antivaccine fear mongering. In fact, this passage should tell you all you need to know about the publication: Autism File is a lifestyle guide […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Fighting the “acid” of negative (e)motions?

If there’s one quack who both amuses and appalls me at the same time, it’s Robert O. Young. You remember Robert O. Young, don’t you? He’s the guy who thinks that all disease is caused by excess acid. I’ve written about him quite a few times over the last several years. For instance, he amused […]