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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Massachusetts passes legislation licensing naturopathic quackery. Only the governor can stop it now.

In a perverse way, one almost has to admire naturopaths. If there’s anything that characterizes naturopaths in their pursuit of legitimacy and licensure, it’s an amazing relentlessness. In this, they are not unlike The Terminator. As Kyle Reese described him in the first Terminator movie, the Terminator “can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine History Medicine Naturopathy

How cute. Naturopathic oncologists are pretending that theirs is a real medical specialty.

Naturopathic oncologists think that they’re real cancer doctors, to the point of even studying their specialty as though it were real. They couldn’t be more wrong.

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Quackademic medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

The Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) doesn’t like me much. I understand. I haven’t exactly been supportive of the group’s mission or activities. So it wasn’t surprising that SIO wrote letters trying to rebut a Perspectives article on “integrative oncology” that I published in Nature Reviews Cancer two years ago. What depressed me about that […]

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

Licensing naturopathic quackery in Mississippi: If at first you don’t succeed…

Here we go again. Naturopaths crave legitimacy for their brand of pseudoscientific medicine. Basically, they delude themselves into thinking that they are real doctors and can function as primary care providers, despite abundant evidence that they cannot. they One (of several) ways they seek to acquire that legitimacy for naturopathy and themselves is through promoting […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Music Popular culture Quackery

Has another celebrity embraced quackery?

I never in a million years thought I’d be writing a blog post involving Selena Gomez. Gomez, as many, if not most, of you are probably aware is currently a young pop star and actress who got her start as a child actress. Oddly enough, she was on Barney & Friends with Demi Lovato. These […]