Categories
Medicine Politics Quackery Television

America’s Quack Dr. Oz and the failure of medical academia, revisited

It’s Election Day. Worse, it’s quite possible that America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz could be Senator-Elect Oz by tomorrow. He was helped by a profound failure of medical academia in general and Columbia University in particular.

Categories
Politics Quackery Television

Did Columbia University cut ties with Dr. Oz?

Decades after “America’s Quack” Dr. Oz pioneered “integrating” quackery into medicine and after many years of promoting diet scams and quackery on a nationally syndicated daily television show, Columbia University might actually have quietly downgraded his status. What took so long?

Categories
Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Religion

An embarrassing paean to reiki in The Atlantic

For some inexplicable reason, The Atlantic published an embarrassing paean to the mystical magical woo that is reiki.

Categories
Bad science Medicine Physics Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Luminas Pain Relief Patches: Where the words “quantum” and “energy” really mean “magic”

Orac discovers the Luminas Pain Relief Patch. He is amused at how how quacks confuse the words “quantum” and “energy” with magic.

Categories
Medicine Physics Quackery

Charlie Goldsmith: A new celebrity quack arises, enabled by TLC

Two years ago, I took note of an “energy healer” named Charlie Goldsmith and an incredibly poor “clinical trial” being touted as evidence of his healing abilities. It now turns out that Goldsmith is following a trail blazed by celebrity psychic Tyler Henry and has his own TV show on TLC. His claims are no more plausible or supported by evidence now than they were then.