Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Selling homeopathy to pediatricians

I’ve never been able to figure out how anyone who claims to be devoted to science and scientific medicine can take homeopathy the least bit seriously. None of it makes any sense scientifically. Its basic principal of the “Law of Similars” has far more basis in the concepts of sympathetic magic than anything that science […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Quackademic medicine in the U.S.: The view from the U.K.

David Colquhoun, eminent scientist and maintainer of the excellent blog DC’s Improbable Science, has recently returned home to the U.K. after a trip across the pond to the U.S. and Canada, where, among other things, he gave a lecture at the University of Toronto, as well as the Riker Memorial Lecture at the Oregon Health […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Humor Medicine Quackery

If “alternative” medicine is okay, why not “alternative” cleaning?

With all the woo infiltrating hospitals these days, as I’ve lamented about in constructing my Academic Woo Aggregator, it was only a matter of time until these ways of thinking started to infiltrate other lines of work. Why not “alternative janitorial services” as well? After reading about it, I wonder how long before it spreads […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Acupuncture and hot flashes in breast cancer patients: No effect

I used to be of the opinion that there might just be something to acupuncture. No, I never thought there was anything to the notion that acupuncture “works” by somehow rerouting the flow of a magical life force (qi) that no scientific instrument can detect and that no practitioner of acupuncture (or other practioners “healing […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery Science

Straw men everywhere about evidence-based medicine

NOTE: Orac is on vacation recharging his Tarial cells and interacting with ion channel scientists, as a good computer should. In the meantime, he is rerunning oldies but goodies, classics, even. (OK, let’s not get carried away.) Here’s one from all the way back in 2007. Notice how, the more things change, the more they […]