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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

CAM use, but not all CAM use, is correlated with skipping chemotherapy

So-called “alternative” medicine is made up of a hodge-podge of health care practices and treatments based on beliefs that are unscientific, pre-scientific, and pseudoscientific. These modalities include practices as diverse as homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, reflexology, reiki and other forms of “energy medicine” based on vitalism, chiropractic, and naturopathy, and that’s a short list of […]

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Biology Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discoverer of Artemisinin: A triumph of natural product pharmacology, not traditional Chinese medicine

Earlier this week, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Youyou Tu for her discovery of the anti-malaria compound Artemisinin, as well as to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura for their discovery of a novel therapy for roundworm. Artemisinin, as some of you might know, is a compound derived from traditional […]

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Biology Complementary and alternative medicine History Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

Science and the AAAS sell their souls to promote pseudoscience in medicine

NOTE: There is a follow up to this post. The holidays are over. Time to start dishing out fresh Insolence, Respectful and, as appropriate, not-so-Respectful for 2015. I do, however, feel obligated to deal with one painfully inappropriate action by a major science journal left over from 2014. It happened in an issue that came […]