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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

What’s in a placebo? Mike Adams certainly doesn’t know.

If there’s one thing that confounds advocates of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), it’s the placebo effect. That’s because, whenever most such remedies are studied using rigorous clinical trial design using properly constituted placebo controls, they almost always end up showing effects no greater than placebo effects. That’s the main reason why they frequently […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Politics Quackery

A brief, diluted homeopathic interlude

I was out late last night due to the call of duty. By the time I got home, it was too late, and I was too beat to provide you with the heapin’ helpin’ of Insolence, Respectful or not-so-Respectful, that I usually do. Nor did I have time to draft a substantive reply to Dr. […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion

A fallacy-laden attack on science-based medicine, revisited

On Monday I took a blogger by the name of Dr. Marya Zilberberg to task for firing a series of profoundly anti-scientific broadsides against science-based medicine (SBM). Although I did not attack Dr. Zilberberg personally, I was quite harsh in my characterization of her attacks, because, well, they were quite bad, full of straw men, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Medicine Quackery

Who knew? Mike Adams and I share a problem

Forgive me if I’m feeling a little schadenfreude right now. My current blog location has been criticized in the past for a variety of things, including, most recently, Pepsigate. One of the things that we’ve been criticized for is our on-again off-again use of Google Adsense, where the content of the page dictates which ads […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

HuffPost Health: A soon-to-be one-stop shop for quackery?

Oh, goody. Just what we need. Some of my readers sent this to me yesterday, and I, like them, was appalled. Apparently that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, has decided that it’s starting a “real” health section (to be, apparently, distinguished from its old “Lifestyle” section, where previously most of its […]