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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Acupuncture and COPD? Not so fast…

I acquiesce. I know that I’m not going to have a lot of control over my selection of blogging material for a given day when I see more than one or two requests for an analysis of an article. So it was, when links like these were showing up in my e-mail: Acupuncture May Help […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

Once again: “Plausibility” does not mean “knowing the mechanism”

I tend to get lost in complexity from time to time. I know, big surprise to my regular readers, but I suppose it’s a good thing that at least I know that this is a weakness of mine. Indeed, it must be part and parcel of my seeming tendency to produce epic posts of ridiculous […]

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Biology Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Supplements: Not mystical anticancer magic

It’s no secret that over the years I’ve been very critical of a law passed nearly 20 years ago, commonly referred to as the DSHEA of 1994. The abbreviation DSHEA stands for about as Orwellian a name for a law as I can imagine: the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Of course, as we’ve […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The (not so) Thinking Moms’ (D)evolution’s Declaration

One of the most inaptly named groups I’ve ever seen is called Thinking Moms’ Revolution (henceforth abbreviated as TMR). Given the reality of what TMR really is, the word “thinking” applied to TMR is, as they say, so wrong it’s not even wrong. As for a “revolution,” what TMR really represents is nothing revolutionary at […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

I know you are, but what am I?

Denialism. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The story might be apocryphal, and it might not even be true, but it’s often used as a metaphor. I’m referring to the “boiling frog” story. Basically, the idea is supposedly based on an observation that a frog, […]