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History Medicine Surgery

Back in time in medicine

Being a Doctor Who fan and all, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be able to travel through time and visit times and places in history that I’m most interested in. For instance, being a World War II buff, I’d certainly want to be able to check out what every day life […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Movies Music Quackery Science

Tim Minchin’s “Storm” to be animated

As regular readers know, I really like Tim Minchin’s take on skepticism in general and on alternative medicine in particular. His piece de resistance thus far in his career is a “nine minute beat poem” entitled Storm, in which at a dinner party our performer is forced to deal with a female version of Mike […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Making legal threats against a blogging cancer patient? Stay classy, Shayla McCallum and Dr. Thomas Lodi. Stay classy.

I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it more times than I can remember. Purveyors of unscientific medicine don’t have the goods. If they had the goods, then their nostrums wouldn’t be called “alternative” medicine anymore; they’d just be medicine. Because they don’t have the goods in the form of science and clinical evidence, all […]

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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 Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The Three Musketeers of Woo attack science-based medicine

I realize that I haven’t done an installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo for a while–well over a month, in fact. Because of the gap between woo installments, I had been thinking that today was the time. There are at least a couple of really good candidates (and a host of halfway decent ones) […]