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

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Woo for credit, or the woo dreams are made of

One of the banes of a physician’s existence is not so much keeping up with changes in how medicine is practiced, studying new treatments, and following the medical literature. After all, that comes with the territory; it’s part of the job. Failure to keep up is to become increasingly ineffective and even to risk malpractice […]

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Clinical trials Evolution Medicine Science

Medicine and Evolution, Part 11: Studying the mechanism of multidrug resistance

Our creationist neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, isn’t going to like this one bit. No doubt he’ll try to call it “artificial selection” or a “tautology” when he finds out about it, if he doesn’t just ignore it because he it doesn’t fit in with his view that studying evolution is “of no value” in medicine. […]

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Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Another young life claimed by a misguided faith in alternative medicine

A number of readers have mailed me links to this story, and, yes, it is right up my alley. In reading it, I fear that it’s a vision of the future for two young cancer patients who are very unlikely to survive their cancers because their parents eschewed evidence-based medicine in favor of woo, Starchild […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Complementary and alternative medicine: A double standard

While I’m on the topic of alternative medicine and NCCAM again, I’ve said on many occasions that I reject the distinction between evidence-based medicine and “alternative medicine” as a false dichotomy. To me, the only dichotomy that matters is between medicine that has high quality scientific evidence showing that it works and medicine that does […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Woo infiltrates the very heart of scientific medicine in the U.S.

I’ve complained on multiple occasions about the infiltration of non-evidence-based “medicine” (a.k.a. woo) into every level of medicine in the U.S.. Worst of all, it’s infiltrating medical education in a big way, starting with the pro-woo activism of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), to various educational programs in various medical schools, to even the […]