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

Taking woo in the military to a whole new level: Deploying acupuncturists to Iraq

Several months ago, I wrote a post about the experimentation with acupuncture by an Air Force physician, Col. Robert Niemtzow. In the post, I started with an admittedly exaggerated vignette–a story, if you will–of a soldier whose leg was shredded by a mortar in battle. When the medic came to treat his wounds and get […]

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Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Politics Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Best review of Expelled! ever?

It may well be; Roger Ebert has finally gotten around to reviewing Expelled! Short version: He didn’t like it. Long version: He really, really didn’t like it. I knew there was a reason I liked Roger Ebert.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Biology Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

“Germany, we have a problem…” Or: Should anything be done about two bad apples of pseudoscience on the tree of ScienceBlogs.de?

Well, it looks as though I’ve stepped into it yet one more time. Believe it or not, I hadn’t intended to stir up trouble among the ScienceBlogs collective, both English- and German-speaking. Really. Oh, I’ll admit that there are occasionally times when I actually do mean to stir up trouble. One recent example is when […]

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Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Denialism: Sometimes there’s no other way to describe it. Except maybe one.

Here we go again. Every so often, one of the–shall we say?–less popular members of our crew of science bloggers, someone who, despite being an academic whose area of expertise is ostensibly science communication, has stepped in it again. I’m referring, of course to Matt Nisbet. Only this time, it’s not him lecturing us just […]

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Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Where’s that Doctor Doom mask again?

As I sat down on the couch in front of the TV last night to do my nightly blogging ritual, trying to tickle the gray matter to come up with the pearls of wisdom or insolence that my readers have come to know and love, I had a fantastic idea for a serious consideration of […]