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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery Television

Most credulous news report on an “alternative medicine” treatment ever?

Just as a quick followup to my post on Tong Ren, the quackery that combines acupuncture, “energy healing,” and, in essence, the stereotype of voodoo dolls in a veritable potpourri of woo, take a look at this news report done by the FOX News affiliate in Boston: If you want horrible, credulous, idiotic reporting, the […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Tong Ren: An unholy union of acupuncture and voodoo

After four years and five days of nearly continuous blogging about skepticism, quackery, science- and evidence-based medicine, and a variety of other topics, you’d think there wouldn’t be much that I haven’t seen before. Certainly, lately, I’ve been wondering lately if there was anything left that could surprise me or horrify me anymore, and jaded […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Monday afternoon mandatory reading

Three goodies on skepticism and science: Skeptical Battlegrounds: Part III – Alternative Medicine. Suffice it to say, Steve agrees with me. He just lays it all out in one post instead of ten. Once again, Egnor and Tautologies. Blogchild Mark Chu-Carroll takes on our favorite creationist neurosurgeon, Dr. Egnor. This time he deals directly with […]

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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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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) goes for the bandwagon fallacy again

It figures. Right around the time of my blogiversary yesterday, when I had intended nothing more than a brief by characteristically self-indulgent bit of navel-gazing twaddle (at which, I succeeded brilliantly, I might add; no one–and I mean no one–does self-indulgent navel-gazing twaddle better than I do), what should be there tempting me from my […]