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Biology Complementary and alternative medicine Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

“Academic freedom” for pseudoscience?

Readers may have noticed (or maybe they haven’t) that I haven’t commented at all on the Guillermo Gonzalez case. As you may recall, Gonzalez is an astronomer at Iowa State University, as well as advocate of “intelligent design” creationism. In May 2007, ISU denied tenure to Gonzalez. Not surprisingly, the ID movement in general and […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Saturday afternoon lazy troll feeding

See what happens when I actually manage to keep myself from checking my blog for nearly 24 whole hours? The trolls take over. Well, they’re not exactly trolls. Trolls often don’t believe in what they post; they merely post it to get a reaction, for example, like rabid Hillary Clinton opponents posting on pro-Clinton discussion […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Another reason why homeopathy still persists?

A few weeks ago, Martin over at Aardvarchaelogy, Steve Novella, and I speculated about how alternative medicine modalities might evolve and what the selection pressures on them might be. We all agreed that, to some degree, there is definite selection pressure for remedies that do no harm but that also do no objective good either. […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Humor Medicine Quackery

Pity the poor UK homeopath…

…because, via Skeptico and DC’s Improbably Science, I’ve learned something that could only warm the coldest cockles of my evil scientific and skeptical heart. It’s something that tells us that, maybe, just maybe, what we bloggers do in favor of evidence-based medicine may actually be having an effect. British homeopath Manish Bhatia, Director of hpathy.com, […]

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Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The ethics of therapeutic touch

Lest I forget to mention this one, Randy Cohen, a.k.a. The Ethicist, answers a question. Here’s the question: I work at a hospital where several nurses practice therapies like healing touch and therapeutic touch, said to adjust a patient’s energy field and thereby decrease pain and improve healing, although there is no significant evidence for […]