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

Finally, the Department of Justice and FDA go after unsafe supplements in a big way

Now that’s what I’m talking about! Yesterday, the Justice Department announced criminal charges and lawsuits against the sellers of several supplements! This is the ort of thing that is long overdue—incredibly so, in fact. Before I get to this specific case, let’s discuss a little background. One of the regular topics I write about, both […]

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

Congress polishes the turd that was NCCAM

With the way our dysfunctional federal government works, it’s not uncommon for the end of a fiscal year to come and go without there being a budget for the next fiscal year in place. This phenomenon is particularly common during election years, and this year was no different. September 30 came and went, followed by […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Time for Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014, a.k.a. Quackery Week

In my eagerness to note that Brian Hooker’s “reanalysis” of a ten year old study that failed to find a correlation between vaccines and autism had been retracted, I forgot to write about what I was originally planning on writing about yesterday. It actually would have been more appropriate a topic for yesterday, because it […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Naturopathy Politics Quackery

Thanks to the U.S. Senate, the week of October 7 to 13, 2013 is now Quackery Week

Naturopathy is quackery. There, I said it. Actually, I’ve said it many times before, because it is. The problem with naturopathy, of course, is that it is so diffuse and encompasses so many different forms of quackery that it’s hard to categorize. Basically, it’s anything that can be portrayed as “natural,” be it traditional Chinese […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Quackery

Representative Dan Burton’s last antivaccine hurrah is scheduled for November 29

Whenever I blog about atrocities against science like the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I’m frequently asked how just such an edifice designed to promote pseudoscience could have come to be as a full-fledged center in the National Institutes of Health. The answer is simple and boils down to woo-loving legislators. In […]