Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A mathematical model for the persistence of quackery

I’m sure it’s obvious that I’m often puzzled (and, I daresay, many other skeptics and boosters of science- and evidence-based medicine are puzzled too) over why various forms of quackery and woo that have either about as close to zero prior probability as one can imagine and/or (more frequently “and”) have failed to show evidence […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Fresh from HuffPo: Antibiotics cause cancer?

I’m really starting to hate the Huffington Post. It used to be that I just disliked it intensely. The reasons are, of course, obvious. Ever since its very beginning nearly four years ago, HuffPo has been a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. Over the years, it’s served up pseudoscience and antivaccine nuttery from such “luminaries” of […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

In which I echo PalMD…

Blog bud PalMD was asked this most difficult question: A colleague of mine asked a great question: if you have one question to ask a booster of so-called alternative medicine in a public forum, what should it be? To which he responded: My answer: “Can you please give specific examples of alternative medicine theories and […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Generation Rescue and “Fourteen Studies”

About a week and a half ago, something happened that makes me realize that the Jenny and Jim antivaccine propaganda tour that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was clearly only phase I of Generation Rescue’s April public relations offensive. About ten days ago, courtesy of J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, who […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Homeopathy and side effects due to cancer therapy: When bad journalism attacks

I’ve complained about it time and time again because it’s annoyed me time and time again. Specifically, I’m talking about how various news outlets report scientific studies involving so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), sometimes called “integrative medicine” (IM), the latter of which I like to refer to adding a bit of woo to make […]