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Bad science Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Quackademic medicine, COVID-19 edition, part 1: Magic amulets

“Quackademic medicine” is a term coined to describe the increasing infiltration of pseudoscience and quackery into medical academia. Unsurprisingly, we’re starting to see quackademic medicine turn its attention to COVID-19. In this case, traditional Chinese medicine is invoked to claim that magic amulets might prevent COVID-19,

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Homeopathy at UC-Irvine: The administration can run but it can’t hide from its history of embracing quackery

Last week, UC-Irvine announced a $200 million gift from Susan and Henry Samueli to create a new integrative medicine center. Since then, UC-Irvine has tried to scrub any evidence of homeopathy use on its website. It didn’t work. Unfortunately, thanks to the Samuelis, homeopathy and other pseudoscience are deeply embedded in UC-Irvine, which has become the new epitome of quackademic medicine.

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Your tax dollars at work: New clinical trial of chelation therapy, new and old quacks enrolling patients

Whenever I refer to quackademic medicine and how the infiltration of quackery into medical academia has led to unethical clinical that are not only pseudoscientific wastes of money but potentially downright harmful to patients, two always come to mind. The first is the trial that tested the late Nicholas Gonzalez’s protocol for advanced pancreatic cancer, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Quackery expands in the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

I’ve been writing about this topic so long—ever since the very beginning of this blog—that it seems as though I’ve always been doing it even though this blog has been in existence only 11 years and I didn’t really come to appreciate the problem until after I had started this blog. No, I’m not referring […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Quackademic medicine and acupressure at my alma mater

Given the study that I’m going to discuss, I can’t help but start out with a brief (for me) reminiscence. Longtime readers know that I graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in the late 1980s. Back when I attended U. of M., its medical school was considered stodgy and hard core even by […]