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Clinical trials Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Cranks against peer review

One of the favorite targets of pseudoscientists is the peer review system. After all, it’s the system through which scientists submit their manuscripts describing their scientific findings or their grant proposals to their peers for an evaluation to determine whether they are scientifically meritorious enough to be published or to be funded. Creationists hate it. […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Woo infiltrates the very heart of scientific medicine in the U.S.

I’ve complained on multiple occasions about the infiltration of non-evidence-based “medicine” (a.k.a. woo) into every level of medicine in the U.S.. Worst of all, it’s infiltrating medical education in a big way, starting with the pro-woo activism of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), to various educational programs in various medical schools, to even the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Complementary and alternative medicine: A double standard

While I’m on the topic of alternative medicine and NCCAM again, I’ve said on many occasions that I reject the distinction between evidence-based medicine and “alternative medicine” as a false dichotomy. To me, the only dichotomy that matters is between medicine that has high quality scientific evidence showing that it works and medicine that does […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Government-funded woo

It’s that time of year again! Time for the one Center of the NIH dedicated to studying “remedies,” regardless of how scientifically implausible or lacking in evidence to support them, the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to put forth its budget request for FY 2008. What’s the bill for government-funded studies of […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Argh! Chelationists are mailing pitches to my office!

Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he’s rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on February 10, 2005. Enjoy! A few days ago, I had been thinking that […]