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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Homeopathy kills a child

Homeopathy is water. Homeopaths will tell you otherwise. They will tell you that water “memory,” which, the way they describe it is some mystical property whereby it “remembers” the remedy with which it’s been in contact, even though the substance (whatever it was) has been diluted far beyond the point where there’s likely to be […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Another acupuncture study misinterpreted

I have to hand it to acupuncture mavens. They are persistent. Despite numerous studies failing to find any evidence that acupuncture is anything more than an elaborate placebo whose effects, such as they are, derive from nonspecifice mechanisms having nothing to do with meridians, qi, or “unblocking” qi. Moreover, consistent with the contention that acupuncture […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine News of the Weird Quackery

Milk: It’ll do a body good! For cancer?

Here’s one of the stranger “alternative cancer cure” cases I’ve seen in a while. Basically, a man seems to think that a daily helping of his daughter’s breast milk will cure his metastatic colon cancer: When Tim Browne sits down to a bowl of corn flakes in the morning, he slurps up one unusual, and […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

Oprah and Chopra sittin’ in a tree…

I know I’ve been very hard on Oprah Winfrey the last couple of weeks, taking her to task for her promotion on her show of medicine that is at best dubious and at worst quackery, as promoted by frequent guests like Suzanne Somers, Dr. Christiane Northrup, and the queen of the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny “I’m […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Oh goody. Homeopathy awareness week begins

I bet you didn’t know this (maybe because of homeopathic publicity), but today is the first day of Homeopathy Awareness Week, which runs from June 14 to 21. It turns out that I’m torn over whether to mention or do much about this. On the one hand, publicizing the magical, mystical thinking that is homeopathy […]