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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Adventures in bad veterinary medicine reported by the local media, year end edition

Ever since moving back to the Detroit area nearly seven years ago, one thing I’ve noticed is a propensity for our local news outlets to go full pseudoscience from time to time. I’m not sure why, other than perhaps that it attracts eyeballs to the screen, but, in reality, most of these plunges into pseudoscience […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Humor Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Merry Christmas from Deepak Chopra

As Orac takes a couple of days to commune with family (as amazing as it is, yes, a Plexiglass box of blinking colored lights has a family) and celebrate the season, here’s a lost Christmas gem from Deepak Chopra, who interprets Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol. Unfortunately, embedding is disabled; so you’ll have to […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Congress polishes the turd that was NCCAM

With the way our dysfunctional federal government works, it’s not uncommon for the end of a fiscal year to come and go without there being a budget for the next fiscal year in place. This phenomenon is particularly common during election years, and this year was no different. September 30 came and went, followed by […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Who knew? My state’s vaccine personal belief exemption rate stinks! (Part 2: What to do.)

After yesterday’s post on the depressingly high (and increasing, apparently) rate of personal belief exemptions to vaccination requirements for entering school in the state of Michigan, I felt the need to pontificate a bit further. The reason is that MLive.com has posted some followup stories. Also, I didn’t have a lot of time last night […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Old wine in a new skin: The Society for Integrative Oncology promotes integrating pseudoscience into oncology

Last week, I discussed a monograph published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monographs entitled Clinical Practice Guidelines on the Use of Integrative Therapies as Supportive Care in Patients Treated for Breast Cancer. As you might remember, I was completely unimpressed. However, those guidelines were not the only thing in that particular JNCI […]