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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

The Tripoli Six revisited

Last fall, I and quite a few other bloggers wrote about the Tripoli Six. These are six foreign medical workers arrested for allegedly intentionally infecting over 400 children with HIV in a Libyan hospital and, thanks to the ignorant hysteria whipped up against them and the need of the Libyan government to find scapegoats for […]

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Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Recently, I discussed a story by the BBC news show Panorama about the Church of Scientology and its ridiculous anti-psychiatry museum. Unfortunately, the show doesn’t always do things right. Over at Bad Science, I find how badly Panorama messed up a story on Wi-Fi, claiming health dangers on the basis of bad science and interviews […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Woo for credit, or the woo dreams are made of

One of the banes of a physician’s existence is not so much keeping up with changes in how medicine is practiced, studying new treatments, and following the medical literature. After all, that comes with the territory; it’s part of the job. Failure to keep up is to become increasingly ineffective and even to risk malpractice […]

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Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Another young life claimed by a misguided faith in alternative medicine

A number of readers have mailed me links to this story, and, yes, it is right up my alley. In reading it, I fear that it’s a vision of the future for two young cancer patients who are very unlikely to survive their cancers because their parents eschewed evidence-based medicine in favor of woo, Starchild […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Complementary and alternative medicine: A double standard

While I’m on the topic of alternative medicine and NCCAM again, I’ve said on many occasions that I reject the distinction between evidence-based medicine and “alternative medicine” as a false dichotomy. To me, the only dichotomy that matters is between medicine that has high quality scientific evidence showing that it works and medicine that does […]