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

If randomized clinical trials don’t show that your woo works, try anthropology!

A common refrain among practitioners and advocates of alternative medicine is that the reason randomized clinical trials frequently fail to find any objective evidence of clinical efficacy for their favorite woo is because, in essence, science is not the right tool to evaluate whether it works. In essence, they either appeal to other ways of […]

Categories
History Holocaust Skepticism/critical thinking World War II

Skepticism undermined by an insufficient knowledge of history

I’ll admit it. There have been at least two times since I started blogging that I fell for a dubious story because I exercised insufficient skepticism. The first time occurred very early on in my blogging history when swallowed a story about how legalization of prostitution was claimed to lead to the requirement that unemployed […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics Science

Bloviations and pontifications on the state of cancer research, part 2 (of 2)

In rapid succession after the last pontificating and bloviating article claiming that there will never be a cure for cancer because it would be too financially disastrous to the medical economy, I’ve been made aware of another pontificating and bloviating article decrying the state of cancer research today, entitled Curing Cancer: Running on Vapor, Remedy: […]

Categories
Entertainment/culture Television

A Detroit icon has passed away

This one will probably not mean much to those who don’t have a Detroit connection (such as, like me, having been born there and spent the first 26 years of my life in southeast Michigan), and it will probably mean nothing at all to my cadre of international readers, but it saddens me nonetheless to […]

Categories
Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Medicine and Evolution, Part 10: “Intelligent design” creationists misrepresenting the role of evolution in medicine

If there’s one undeniable aspect of “intelligent design” creationism advocates, it is their ability to twist and misrepresent science and any discussions of evolution to their own ends. Be it Dr. Michael Egnor‘s twisting of history to claim that eugenics is based on Darwinism, rather than the artificial selection (or, as we snarky ones like […]