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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Politics Quackery

Can Alternative and Conventional Medicine Get Along? No.

If there’s one thing that I write that I don’t feel I repeat too much (although some might disagree), it’s that, unlike other centers and institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), there is not, and never was, a compelling scientific justification for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to exist […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Popular culture

CVS, tobacco, and knee jerk reflexes

Now we come to a post in which Orac unloads a bit about one of his pet peeves. It is a post that will likely piss a few people off on “his” side. If it does, so be it. He does this now because yesterday something happened that irritated the crap out of me because […]

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Announcements Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Orac wants you to join the Society for Science-Based Medicine

Because of my involvement in this organization, I am hijacking my own blog for one day for my own nefarious purposes. To that end, I am republishing an announcement that originally appeared yesterday at a blog that a significant fraction of you are familiar with, but nowhere near all of you. And I want all […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

A rather clueless defense of CAM from across the pond

Acupuncture is quackery. This cannot be repeated often enough, and, in fact, over the last several months I’ve developed a tendency to start all my posts on acupuncture by making sure to remind everyone that it is quackery. The reasons are many-fold. For one thing, the concepts behind acupuncture are based on the claim that […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Politics Popular culture Quackery

Chairman Mao: The real inventor of “traditional Chinese medicine”

Most, if not virtually all, of what is now referred to as “traditional Chinese medicine” is quackery. I realize that it’s considered “intolerant” and not politically correct to say that in these days of “integrative medicine” departments infiltrating academic medical centers like so much kudzu enveloping a telephone pole, but I don’t care. I’m supposed […]