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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

A quackfest at the University of Toronto

I always thought that the University of Toronto was a great school, but lately I’ve been starting to have my doubts. My doubts began three years ago, when I noticed that Autism One Canada, which is basically the Canadian version of the yearly antivaccine biomedical quackfest held every Memorial Day week in the Chicago area, […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Dr. Francis Collins and “integrative oncology”

I was disturbed several months ago when I learned that the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, had agreed to be the keynote speaker at the Eight International Society for Integrative Oncology Conference in Cleveland, OH. I say “doubly” disturbed because it disturbed me that Francis Collins would agree to speak at […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Surgery

Naturopaths vs. “stayin’ alive”

For all the good things about my life there are, there is one bad thing, and that was that I was born so that I reached high school age right at the height of the disco era. At least, that’s the way I viewed it at the time because at the time, like many teenaged […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

Which alt-med is which Republican candidate?

Best analogy ever? I think it’s a contender, straight from Balloon Juice: The Republican party in Iowa reminds me of a patient with a terminal disease (Romneyitis) desperately turning to alternative medacine. They’ve cycled through homeopathy (Bachmann), naturopathy (Cain), chelation (Perry) and aromatherapy (Paul). Now they’ve hit the final frontier–urotherapy. I’m glad that I’ve never […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Quacks react to Andrew Weil’s proposed board certification in woo

About a month ago, I discussed a rather disturbing development, namely the initiative by Dr. Andrew Weil to set up something he was going to call the American Board of Integrative Medicine, all for the purpose of creating a system of board certification for physicians practicing “integrative medicine” (IM), or, as I prefer to call […]