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

Let President-Elect Obama know that he should defund NCCAM!

P.Z. Myers turned me on to a phenomenal proposal at Change.gov, the website of President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition team: Defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Here’s a way to increase the available funding to NIH without increasing the NIH budget: halt funding to NCCAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery Television

Bill Maher on Christine Maggiore’s book

Last week, I did multiple posts about the death of HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore of what for all the world looked like an HIV-related pneumonia, the excuses HIV/AIDS denialists made to try to persuade people that it wasn’t AIDS, and the attempted coverup of damning posts. In the past, I’ve also taken a certain comedian […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Quackery Television

Rallying resistance to the antivaccine jihad

About four weeks ago, I wrote what I thought to be an amusing piece about how our blog “buddy” J. B. Handley, antivaccine advocate extraordinaire and now second fiddle in the organization he founded (Generation Rescue) to a Jenny-come-lately former purveyor of Indigo Child woo previously best known for being Playboy Playmate of the Year, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Humor Medicine Politics Quackery

The best trial of Qi Gong ever?

In responding to Deepak Chopra’s “integrative medicine” nonsense from last week that I “https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2009/01/the_three_musketeers_of_woo_meet_dartagn.php,” Derek Lowe proposes the best trial of Qi Gong ever: “Chronic pain is one of the major sources of worker’s compensation claims costs, yet studies show that it is often susceptible to acupuncture and Qi Gong. Herbs usually have far fewer […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

The Three Musketeers of Woo meet d’Artagnan to fight for woo on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal

The seemingly never-ending quest of advocates of unscientific medicine, the so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) movement is to convince policy makers, patients, and physicians that, really and truly, it no longer deserves the qualifier of “alternative,” that it is in fact mainstream and even “scientific.” That very search for respectability without accountability is the […]