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Medicine Politics Quackery Television

America’s Quack Dr. Oz and the failure of medical academia, revisited

It’s Election Day. Worse, it’s quite possible that America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz could be Senator-Elect Oz by tomorrow. He was helped by a profound failure of medical academia in general and Columbia University in particular.

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Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Quackery

Is there such a thing as the “placebome”?

As results from randomized clinical trials show that alternative medicine is nothing more than placeboe, quacks like to argue that they are “harnessing the power of placebo” with their methods and that placebos have real healing effect. They’ve even gone so far as to make up a genomics-based concept: The placebome. But is there such a thing as the placebome?

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Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Religion

An embarrassing paean to reiki in The Atlantic

For some inexplicable reason, The Atlantic published an embarrassing paean to the mystical magical woo that is reiki.

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Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Television

Animal Planet: Showcasing acupuncture quackery at the San Diego Zoo

A recent episode of The Zoo:San Diego featured acupuncture quackery at the San Diego Zoo. But it’s even worse than that. Tembo the elephant was subjected to more than just acupuncture quackery.

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery

Acupuncture for xerostomia: Spin, spin, spin a negative study!

Investigators at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center reported the results of a trial of acupuncture for xerostomia (dry mouth) secondary to radiation therapy for head and neck cancers. It was a negative trial, but investigators still tried to spin it as positive, but with a twist. There was a large difference between results found at M.D. Anderson and the second site in China. What could be going on?