A common refrain among practitioners and advocates of alternative medicine is that the reason randomized clinical trials frequently fail to find any objective evidence of clinical efficacy for their favorite woo is because, in essence, science is not the right tool to evaluate whether it works. In essence, they either appeal to other ways of […]
Category: Complementary and alternative medicine
Via Kevin, MD, here’s a piece that almost could have been written by me: CAM exists in an alternate universe from real medicine. It wants to be legitimate but manages to avoid the responsibilities and liability of real medical practice. As most CAM treats nebulous symptoms with equally nebulous modalities, there is no measurable standard […]
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Everybody (well, mostly everybody) learns in science and physics class the Three Laws of Thermodynamics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, meaning that the increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings. […]
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You may remember how, almost in passing as part of a longer post, I mentioned how much cranks can’t stand critics of theirs who write under a pseudonym and try to out them at every opportunity. Indeed, one of the biggest cranks of all, J.B. Handley, the man whose mantra used to be that autism […]
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Dr. Steven Novella, an academic neurologist, President of the New England Skeptical Society, and organizer of what’s become my favorite skeptical podcast, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, took the time to weigh in on the Nature Neuroscience article that I discussed the other day and that engendered dozens of comments, as posts about antivaccination […]
