Categories
Bad science Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Placebos without deception: Misinformation that never dies

He’s ba-ack! Longtime “integrative medicine” apologist and exaggerator of the “power of placebos” Ted Kaptchuk is promting misinformation again in an op-ed in The New York Times.

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Is it even possible to design high quality acupuncture trials?

Acupuncture advocates have published guidelines for “rigorous” acupuncture randomized controlled trials. While that sounds good on the surface, the devil is in the details, which reveal that acupuncturists’ dedication to scientific rigor is perhaps not so strong.

Categories
Clinical trials Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Aromatase inhibitors and acupuncture in breast cancer

Four years ago, I wrote about an essentially negative study looking at whether acupuncture could alleviate joint pain caused by aromatase inhibitors, a common treatment for estrogen-sensitive breast cancer. The study’s back, and it doesn’t look any more positive.

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Pseudoscience Quackery

Antivaxxers embrace the solvent DMSO as a cure-all

Showing once again that there is no old quackery that antivaxxers won’t embrace, “A Midwestern Doctor” touts the solvent DMSO as a cure-all.

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Antivaccine nonsense Clinical trials

“No saline placebo-controlled vaccine trials”: An old antivax trope

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has resurrected the antivax claim that the childhood vaccine schedule has never been tested in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with a saline placebo controls (and therefore the vaccine schedule is unsafe). This is an old and deceptive antivax half-truth that ignores both what constitutes a scientifically valid placebo and the ethical requirements for RCTs.