Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

CAM in medical schools: A marketing tool?

Fellow ScienceBlogger (I’m not all that enamored of the term “SciBling”) Abel Pharmboy has finally weighed in on the issue of alternative medicine woo finding its way into medical school curricula and its promotion by the American Medical Student Association, which Dr. RW, Joseph, and I have been discussing the last few days. Besides using […]

Categories
Friday Woo Humor Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Getting it on for peace

Given my love of science and advocacy of evidence-based medicine, people may have come to the erroneous conclusion that I hate all woo. Nothing could be further from the truth. I just want medical woo to be subject to the same scientific testing as conventional medicine, because I believe that there should not even be […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Can teaching CAM improve the doctor-patient relationship?

My recent post (coupled with similar posts by Dr. R. W. and Abel Pharmboy) about the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) and its credulous promotion of non-evidence-based alternative medicine while posing as being “skeptical” of big pharma brought this rejoinder from Joseph of Corpus Callosum, in which he took issue with one aspect of my […]

Categories
Entertainment/culture Science fiction/fantasy Television

Babylon 5 to return?

I’m not sure how I feel about this one. I really loved Babylon 5 while it was on; it was one of my favorite TV series of all time, and I own all five seasons on DVD. Even though the fifth and final season seemed a bit stretched out, the last five or six episodes […]

Categories
Medicine Science

Proposed changes in the NIH grant process

Effect Measure has a good post about the NIH granting process. I’m not going to rehash what revere said, as far as the description of what happens once a grant application arrives at the NIH and how it winds its way through the Initial Review Group to one of many study sections through programmatic review. […]