“Alternative medicine,” so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), or, as it’s become fashionable to call it, “integrative medicine” is a set of medical practices that are far more based on belief than science. As my good bud and collaborator Mark Crislip so pointedly reminded us last week, CAM is far more akin to religion than science-based medicine (SBM). However, as I’ve discussed more times than I can remember over the years, both here and at my not-so-super-secret-other blog, CAM practitioners and advocates, despite practicing what is in reality mostly pseudoscience-based medicine, crave the imprimatur that science can provide, the respect …
Category: EneMan
Subjecting children to enema “detoxification”
Even though I’ve been at this skeptical blogging thing, particularly about “alternative” medicine, so long (eight years now) that I think I’ve seen it all, that nothing the quacks do can shock me any more. It’s a foolish hubris, I admit, but, I hope, an understandable one after over eight years of blogging multiple times a week about science, skepticism, and quackery that can and has made my head spin. It is true that encountering something that gets my attention and truly knocks me on my posterior is getting rarer and rarer. It’s not so rare that it doesn’t still …
The joy of Christmas, take 4: Scared for Santa
Continued from Christmas last year… Well, if I were Santa, I’d be scared too if this guy sat on my lap: You didn’t think Christmas could pass without our old friend making an appearance, did you? Yes, our blog mascot can be a bit scary at times to those who have not met him before, but as you can see he’s really into the Christmas spirit:
Happy Thanksgiving!
Continuing the theme from yesterday one last time this week and bringing our long disused blog mascot front and center, I wish all my readers a happy Thanksgiving!
Be afraid, be very afraid…
…EneMan thinks he’s “too sexy”: Unfortunately, someone else is claiming EneMan as her mascot: We can’t have that. Remember, EneMan has been this blogs mascot since December 2004. Maybe he’s getting restless because he hasn’t been featured very often the last couple of years. I wonder if I should remedy that…
“Say hello to my little friend!”
I realize I’ve been a bit remiss in my usual monthly feature, in which I have until recently featured a photo of our blog mascot from the infamous Fleet Pharmaceuticals calendar. This year’s been the most bizarre one of all, a radical departure. One might wonder why I’ve missed August. Here’s why:
Enema of the people? Or our blog mascot must make a pilgrimage
If you happen to be a blogger, has there ever been anything that you meant to blog about, but it totally slipped your mind? This is just such an item for me. Yes, multiple people e-mailed me about this on Friday, and for some reason in my amusement at David Kirby’s antics over the weekend twisting a CDC report and then looking even more clueless as he modified his post in response to his errors being pointed out, producing a mangled mess that made even less sense than before, in all the fun, I totally forgot about the item. And …
An image from San Diego
An image from in front of the San Diego Convention Center last week: I never knew our blog mascot had a second job. I guess working for Fleet must not pay what it used to.
EneMan the science fiction star
As I mentioned in January, everybody’s favorite blog mascot has seemingly undertaken a new career in show biz. In fact, he’s become a big movie star, even popping up in some fairly avant garde movies. This month, however, he’s popping up in a most unexpected place: In one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time:
Better late than never
I’m on the road for the weekend, and Internet access will likely be spotty until sometime Monday afternoon. Does that mean Orac has abandoned his readers? O ye of little faith! Of course not! There are scheduled posts in the meantime; that is, assuming that ScienceBlog’s post scheduling feature doesn’t let me down. Lately, it’s been–shall we say?–rather less than reliable. So if my scheduled posts don’t show up or, as seems to be more common, don’t show up until hours after they were originally scheduled, it’s not my fault. Really. They’re there. First up, never let it be said …