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

Bonus pre-Christmas Friday Woo: Give the gift of woo for Christmas, courtesy of Duke University

It occurred to me. For someone looking for last minute Christmas gifts for the credulous, perhaps the Chi Machine, which I mentioned this morning, won’t fit the bill. One thing about it is that it’s too limited in what it can do, and if I’m going to give the gift of woo for Christmas, I […]

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

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The perfect last minute gift for Christmas–woo!

As hard as it is to believe, yet another Christmas is fast approaching. I can feel it in the blogosphere. Heck, I can feel it here on the ol’ blog. Once garrulous commenters here have gone strangely silent for the most part (at least in comparison to their usual prodigious output), and traffic has already […]

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Cancer Medicine Politics

Well, duh: Insured cancer patients do better

Maybe it’s unfair to proclaim this a “well, duh!” study, but its conclusions do seem rather obvious. On the other hand, it’s information that we need in a cold, hard scientific form, and I’m glad that the investigators did it: (AP) — Uninsured cancer patients are nearly twice as likely to die within five years […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

Enough straw man attacks on evidence-based medicine to defoliate Kansas

Evidence-based medicine is not perfect. There, I’ve said it. Like anything else humans do in science or any other endeavor, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has its strengths and its weaknesses. On the whole, I consider it to be potentially vastly superior to the way that medicine was practiced in the past, bringing a systematic, scientific rigor […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Acupuncture and hot flashes in breast cancer patients: No effect

I used to be of the opinion that there might just be something to acupuncture. No, I never thought there was anything to the notion that acupuncture “works” by somehow rerouting the flow of a magical life force (qi) that no scientific instrument can detect and that no practitioner of acupuncture (or other practioners “healing […]