Categories
Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery

GoFundMe and the problem of crowdfunding for quackery

GoFundMe is frequently used by patients to pay for quackery. How can its policies be changed to make misuse of the platform more difficult?

Categories
Bad science Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

An NCCIH survey on “complementary” health approaches

The NCCIH recently published a study examining the percentage of US physicians who had recommended “complementary health approaches” to their patients in the last year. The percentages are far higher than they should be.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Pseudoscience

Gayle DeLong responds to the retraction of her dumpster fire of a study on HPV vaccination and fertility

Gayle DeLong finally responds to the retraction of her incompetent paper linking HPV vaccination to lowered fertility in women in—of course—the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism. It doesn’t go well.

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery

Acupuncture for xerostomia: Spin, spin, spin a negative study!

Investigators at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center reported the results of a trial of acupuncture for xerostomia (dry mouth) secondary to radiation therapy for head and neck cancers. It was a negative trial, but investigators still tried to spin it as positive, but with a twist. There was a large difference between results found at M.D. Anderson and the second site in China. What could be going on?

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Homeopathy Medicine Popular culture Skepticism/critical thinking

Whole Foods: Still a haven for quackery and antivaccine nonsense under Amazon

Whole Foods was purchased by Amazon in 2017. If you thought that would make a difference in the selling of quackery by Whole Foods, you thought wrong. Homeopathy and antivaccine quackery still rule there.