Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience

A horrifyingly unethical study of chiropractic treatment of infants with torticollis

Orac encounters a study of chiropractice manipulation under anesthesia for infant torticollis. Iit takes a lot to horrify Orac any more, but subjecting infants to unnecessary anesthesia and radiation to crack their necks did it.

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Thomas Jefferson University goes full quack with a department of “integrative medicine”

Quackademic medicine takes a big leap forward at Thomas Jefferson University with its new Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences.

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Quackery

Trojan horse: Selling “integrative oncology” as science-based

Integrative oncology “integrates” quackery with oncology. Its practitioners, however, frequently delude themselves that their specialty is science-based. A recent review article by two integrative oncologists from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center expresses that delusion perfectly.

Categories
Bad science Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery

Traditional Chinese medicine is science, ma-an! National Geographic promotes quackery

There’s a whole genre of quack apologia for traditional Chinese medicine that I like to call “traditional Chinese medicine is science, ma-an!” Basically, it tries to convince you that the prescientific, mystical, vitalistic mass of nonsense that is traditional Chinese medicine is “ancient knowledge” that was far ahead of its time and that its wisdom will be rediscovered to become the future of medicine. It’s utter nonsense, of course. Unfortunately, in its January issue, National Geographic fell for this myth—hard.

Categories
Bad science Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Quoth chiropractor William Cole: “Have your doctor run a bunch of useless functional medicine tests”

“Functional medicine” preaches the “biochemical individuality” of each patient, which is why one of its key features is that its practitioners order reams of useless lab tests and then try to correct every abnormal level without considering (or even knowing) what these abnormalities mean, if anything. So they make up fake diagnoses and profit.