Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy

Giving credit where credit is due to naturopaths…

…is one of my favorite surgeon-bloggers Sid Schwab when he discusses what happens when naturopaths actually subject their “healing art” to scientific examination. In the wake of the rather–shall we say–vigorous discussion that ensued after my post last week about the recently passed law in the State of Minnesota to license and regulate naturopaths, today […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The nuttiness that is Whale.to: Save Scopie’s Law!

Some of you may have heard of John Scudamore’s Whale.to site. I’ve referred to it in the past as a repository of some of the wildest and most bizarre “alternative” medicine claims out there. However, I will admit that I’ve only ever scratched the surface of the insanity that is Whale.to. Kathleen Seidel has dug […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Summer school for woo

Imagine you’re a medical student in a dreaded “allopathic” medical school other than Georgetown. Imagine further that you’re finding the grind of learning science- and evidence-based medicine a bit tiresome. After all, there’s so much to learn: principles of biochemistry, physiology, anatomy (and not with acupuncture points), and neuroscience. You’re reading multiple chapters a night, […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Reclaiming the linguistic high ground: Renaming “complementary and alternative” medicine and the power of language

A few days ago, I was amused by a term coined by Dr. R.W. The term, “quackademic medicine,” was meant to describe the unholy fusion of non-science- and non-evidence-based woo that has infiltrated academic medicine to a disturbing extent over the last decade or two. There was a lot of reaction, mainly positive, to the […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Back to the future: When men were men, quacks were quacks, and the FDA was the FDA

Perusing the skeptical medical blogosphere, I came across some rather amusing, but nonetheless informative, videos from the 1950s about medical quackery. There are a number of aspects of these videos that are a bit unsettling to modern viewers, such as the “doctor knows best” paternalism, naïve faith in the AMA and other medical organizations, the […]