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

Your Friday Dose of Woo (on Wednesday): A homeopath “explains” energy

Damn you, PZ! Not only are you muscling into my territory (what, aren’t creationism and atheism enough?), but you had to subject me to the most mind-numbing example of why homeopaths are the most clueless purveyors of pseudoscience there are! Behold, Dr. Charlene Werner, an optometrist (apparently) and a homeopath. I warn you, however. If […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Requiem for a quack, part II: Hulda Clark, author of The Cure for All Cancers, died of cancer

About a month and half ago, we learned that über-quack Hulda Clark, the woman who said that she had the Cure for All Cancers, had died on September 3, 2009. I was criticized for entitling my post Requiem for a Quack, but, given how Clark’s quackery had contributed to the suffering and deaths of an […]

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Medicine

The 122nd Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle: A committee meeting

I really have to apologize to the Young Australian Skeptics. I screwed up. I didn’t do my duty as organizer of The Skeptics’ Circle. The Aussies provided a bang-up edition of the 122nd Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle, and I didn’t even promote it. So I’m promoting it now. Go. Read. Enjoy. Then join us […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Vaccination for H1N1 “swine” flu: Do The Atlantic, Shannon Brownlee, and Jeanne Lenzer matter?

I had meant to address this topic last week, but the whole Suzanne Somers thing bubbled up and overwhelmed my blogging attention. Regular readers of this blog probably realize that I tend to live and die as a blogger by the maxim that if some is good more must be better. So I clobbered the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

The Atlantic, “methodolatry,” and pandemic swine flu

I’d like to thank revere right now publicly. He’s taught me a new word: Methodolatry: The profane worship of the randomized clinical trial as the only valid method of investigation. Many of my readers have e-mailed me about a recent article in The Atlantic by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer, two reporters whose particular bias […]