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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

A physician takes umbrage at Orac’s criticisms of medical schools

A couple of days ago, I wrote a criticism of the increasing tendency to teach woo in American medical schools and then later followed up with a post questioning the contention that teaching woo has the benefit of improving the doctor-patient relationship. A physician going by the ‘nym Solo Practitioner took umbrage: As a physician, […]

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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 […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Woo: The future of American medicine?

If you’re a physician, there comes a certain point in your career when you start caring a lot more than you did about the next generations of physicians in the training pipeline. While you’re in the middle of training, you are the next generation; besides, you’re too worried about just getting through medical school, residency, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

From the ridiculous to the sublime: A journalist takes down Suzanne Somers over “bio-identicals”

Suzanne Somers annoys me. She annoys me because, despite the fact that her statements and activities over the last 25 years reveal her to be probably no more intelligent than the character that she played on Three’s Company, she still feels the need to spread misinformation about diet and medicine in several books that she […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Justice for Abubakar Tariq Nadama at last?

A little more than a year ago, an autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama died of a cardiac arrest due to hypocalcemia at the hands of an “alternative medicine” practitioner named Dr. Roy Kerry while chelation therapy was being administered to him intravenously. Dr. Kerry, who trained as an ENT doctor, now bills himself as […]