Categories
Anti-Semitism History Humor Politics

Tony Zirkle, You Are Dumb…

…or so sayeth, well…YOU ARE DUMB. Bryan may be a little late in piling on, but better late than never. Zirkle, as you may recall, was the hapless candidate for the Republican nomination to run for a Congressional seat in northwest Indiana who accepted an invitation to speak at a celebration of Hitler’s 119th birthday […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants

Last week’s woo was pretty darned hard to top, don’t you think? It had it all, after all: Boner potentiation, penis enlargement, magnets, near infrared, and more. The only thing it lacked that would have made it absolutely perfect woo were references to pseudoscientific “vibration” or, even better, quantum theory. That’s the reason I could […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

When popularity outpaces science in surgery

In science- and evidence-based medicine, the evaluation of surgical procedures represents a unique challenge that is qualitatively different from the challenges in medical specialties. Perhaps the most daunting of these challenges is that it is often either logistically impossible or unethical to do the gold-standard clinical trial, a double-blind, randomized placebo trial, to test the […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Why aren’t there more clinical trials studying the effect of CAM on cancer?” cries the CAM advocate

I’ve lamented time and time again just how much money the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) wastes on basic research and clinical trials of modalities that are, from a scientific viewpoint, so highly implausible that the chances of finding a clinically useful or relevant–or even a consistent statistically significant–effect (for example, homeopathy […]

Categories
Medicine Politics Religion Science

Science leads you to killing people? Not that nonsense again!

That’s the message that Ben Stein has been pushing lately, namely not just the hated “Darwinism” but science itself inevitably leads to political philosophies such as Nazi-ism and Stalinism (but especially Nazi-ism, given its emphasis on racial hygiene and eugenics), including the mass murder that resulted from them. As a result, Stein has been correctly […]