Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The Katie Couric “apology” about her segment on HPV and HPV vaccines

Vaccines against the human papilloma virus (HPV), such as Gardasil and Cervarix, seem to have a strange power over people who are otherwise reasonable about science and vaccines. For some reason, HPV vaccines seem to have an uncanny ability to turn such people into raging antivaccinationists almost as loony as the merry band of antivaccine […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

Deepak Chopra woo-fully whines about those nasty skeptics on Wikipedia

It occurs to me that things have been perhaps overly serious here at the ol’ blog for the last couple of weeks. Don’t get me wrong. I think I done good lately, if I do say so myself. However, the constant drumbeat of quackery and depressing stories takes its toll after a while. I need […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Naturopathy Politics Quackery

Thanks to the U.S. Senate, the week of October 7 to 13, 2013 is now Quackery Week

Naturopathy is quackery. There, I said it. Actually, I’ve said it many times before, because it is. The problem with naturopathy, of course, is that it is so diffuse and encompasses so many different forms of quackery that it’s hard to categorize. Basically, it’s anything that can be portrayed as “natural,” be it traditional Chinese […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Alternative medicine: The bait and switch is working

For a long time, going back almost to the beginning of this blog eight and a half years ago, I’ve referred to the “bait and switch” of alternative medicine. What I mean by that is the manner in which advocates of alternative medicine—or, as they like to call it these days, “complementary and alternative medicine” […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy

A study contributes to the deceptive rebranding of naturopathy as “lifestyle counseling”

That naturopathy is a veritable cornucopia of quackery mixed with the odd sensible, science-based suggestion here and there is not in doubt, at least not to supporters of science-based medicine (SBM). However, what naturopaths are very good at doing is representing their pseudoscience as somehow being scientific and thus on par with actual SBM. So […]