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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Acupuncture versus science, linguistic edition

In the Journal of Integrative Medicine, acupuncturists argue for modernizing acupuncture by uncoupling it from its traditional Chinese medicine background and avoiding the mystical language about qi and meridians. Hilarity ensues, because acupuncture can’t be separated from the prescientific mysticism from which it arose.

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

Maya's Marvelous Acupuncture?

As hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when I didn’t think that acupuncture was quackery, an ancient “Eastern” treatment that “evolved” from bloodletting not unlike bloodletting in ancient “Western” bloodletting. This time was, hard as it is to believe, less than eight years ago, right around the time just before […]

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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 […]