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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking Television

A publicity stunt against Dr. Oz threatens to backfire spectacularly

I didn’t think I would be writing about this, but, then again, I seem to say that fairly frequently. Be that as it may, on Friday I wrote about a letter sent to Lee Goldman, MD, the Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine at Columbia University complaining about Dr. Mehmet Oz’s promotion […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking Surgery Television

America’s quack, dissected yet again

If there’s one doctor who irritates me possibly more than any other, it’s got to be “America’s Doctor,” a.k.a. Dr. Mehmet Oz, thanks to The Dr. Oz Show. He’s been an all too frequent topic on this blog and at my not-so-super-secret other blog. Of course, I refer to him as “America’s quack,” because, well, […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Combatting antiscience denialism and quackery

I spent a nice long weekend in New York at NECSS, which has grown to quite the big skeptical conference since the last time I was there five years ago. The Friday Science-Based Medicine session went quite well and, as far as I could tell, appeared to be well-received; so hopefully we will be doing […]

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Medicine

“Integrative medicine”: The lure of the shaman healer

Quite to my surprise, apparently I’ve become fairly well known as a critic of so-called “integrative medicine,” that which used to be called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) but whose name was changed because its practitioners didn’t want to be “complementary” to anything. Rather they wanted their woo to be co-equal with science-based medicine (SBM). […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery

The Food Babe: “There is just no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever”

It’s been a while since I’ve taken notice of Vani Hari, a.k.a. The Food Babe, the misguided “food safety” activist who sees chemicals, chemicals, chemicals everywhere and raises fears about them all, especially the ones that she can’t pronounce. The first time I took any significant notice of her was about a year ago, when […]