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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

In which Orac gets even more “shrill and brutish” about chelation therapy and TACT

If there’s one thing that a certain subset of people who view themselves as reasonable and science-based don’t like, it’s harshness: Harshness in criticism, harshness in discussion, or—horror of horrors!—anything they view as “incivility.” That’s all well and good as far as it goes, but the problem is that sometimes there are things that demand […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

The results of the unethical and misbegotten Trial to Asess Chelation Therapy (TACT) are finally revealed

Chelation therapy, in my somewhat Insolent opinion, is pure quackery. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most common quackeries out there, used by a wide variety of practitioners for a wide variety of ailments blamed on “heavy metal toxicity.” Chelation therapy involves using chemicals that can bind to the metal ions and allow them to […]

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Announcements Autism Pseudoscience

Why not just castrate them?

There are many quack treatments for autism, ranging from the benign and ineffective to the harmful and ineffective. Mark and David Geier have come up with one that’s definitely harmful, chemical castration. I thought I’d seen it all, but this is the vilest quackery I’ve seen yet.