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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking Television

Dr. Oz promises to stop promoting pseudoscience. Should we believe him?

Regular readers of this blog will find it no surprise that I don’t think much of Dr. Mehmet Oz. The reason, of course, is that his daily television show, The Dr. Oz Show, has been a font of misinformation about medicine almost since it began airing six years ago. It’s not for nothing that I […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Politics Popular culture Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The AMA acts to try to rein in doctors spreading misinformation

Even if you’re a relative newbie to this blog, you probably wouldn’t be particularly surprised to learn that I don’t much like Dr. Mehmet Oz, a.k.a. “America’s Doctor.” Of course, I refer to him as something slightly different, namely “America’s Quack,” for a whole host of reasons, including his featuring psychic mediums like John Edward […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Another favorite pseudoscience trope: “I’m just providing information”

After having written yesterday’s piece about the fallacy known as the appeal to nature, a favorite fallacy of the alternative medicine crowd. The idea that if something is somehow “natural” it must be superior to anything viewed as “unnatural” or “man-made” is deeply ingrained in pseudoscientific medicine. Heck, there’s even a brand of quackery known […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The decline of pseudoscience? More like the mainstreaming of pseudoscience

As hard as it is to believe, I’ve been spending a significant part of my time countering pseudoscience for close to 17 years, so long that it seems that I’ve always been doing it. Of course, that’s not true; I didn’t actually become involved in this seemingly never-ending Sisyphean task until I was in my […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking Television

America’s quack counterattacks by calling his critics industry hacks

Last week, a group of ten doctors led by Dr. Henry Miller, most of whom were affiliated either with the Hoover Institution or the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH)—or both—wrote a letter to Lee Goldman, MD, the Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine at Columbia University complaining that Dr. Mehmet […]