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Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The Food Babe is to food as Jenny McCarthy is to vaccines

I’ll admit it: I’m a bit of a beer snob. I make no bones about it, I like my beer, but I also like it to be good beer, and, let’s face it, beer brewed by large industrial breweries seldom fits the bill. To me, most of the beer out being sold in the U.S., […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Back to the future with the healing energy of reiki

Over the last two days, both Mark Crislip and Jann Bellamy wrote great pieces over at Science-Based Medicine about reiki. In particular, Jann Bellamy discussed reiki starting with an example that I’ve been citing in my talks about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia for at least four or five years now: The […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture Quackery

Two and a half months later, quacks are still upset about Wikipedia

Quacks really hate Wikipedia. It’s understandable, really. Wikipedia has some fairly tight standards regulating its form and content. Quacks, thinking that because anybody can edit Wikipedia articles it must mean that they can edit the entries on their favorite bit of woo to their hearts’ content in order to make it look more scientifically supported […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Dr. Josephine Briggs needs your help! NCCAM needs a new name!

Pretty much everyone who’s gotten through junior high recognizes the line from the William Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet says, “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, retain that dear perfection which he owes […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The director of NCCAM discovers Bayesian probability. Hilarity ensues.

Over the years, the criticism of “evidence-based medicine” (EBM) that I have repeated here and that I and others have repeated at my not-so-super-secret other blog is that its levels of evidence relegate basic science considerations to the lowest level evidence and elevate randomized clinical trial evidence to the highest rung, in essence fetishizing it […]