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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Update on Starchild Abraham Cherrix

Compared to the usual topics discussed during the week, I normally like to try to keep the weekend fare on the ol’ blog relatively light and fluffy (mainly because traffic usually falls around 50% and I like to post my serious material on skepticism and science on days when I tend to have the most […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Two young victims of alternative medicine

About six months back, I wrote about Katie Wernecke, a 13-year-old girl diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma last year, whose parents fought with Texas courts to let them take her to Kansas to receive high dose vitamin C therapy rather than the chemotherapy and radiation therapy that she needed to have a chance of beating her […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Ah, the irony of it!

This is just too rich. As you know a few months ago, I commented about a British report that found high levels of mercury and other heavy metals in Chinese herbal medicines sold in the U.K. Some contained as much as 11% mercury by weight! It turns out that a JAMA paper from 2004 did […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

How long before I run out of variations on the same lame joke about answering my Seed overlords?

It seems a reasonable question to ask, given my propensity for it. Unfortunately that’s not what our Seed overlords asked this week. This week, they ask: If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be? Predictably, some ScienceBloggers answered: evolution and what it really means, not the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Too much sciency-ness for the vitamin industry?

Damn if PZ didn’t beat me to this one: A federal panel concluded yesterday that there is not enough evidence to recommend for or against use of multivitamins and minerals — the popular dietary supplements taken by more than half of American adults in the hope of preventing heart disease, cancer and other chronic illnesses. […]