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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Justice for Abubakar Tariq Nadama at last?

A little more than a year ago, an autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama died of a cardiac arrest due to hypocalcemia at the hands of an “alternative medicine” practitioner named Dr. Roy Kerry while chelation therapy was being administered to him intravenously. Dr. Kerry, who trained as an ENT doctor, now bills himself as […]

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Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

QuackSafe™ Google searching

Tired of doing Google searches for evidence-based discussions of dubious-sounding medical treatments and finding that the first 100 sites (or, if you’re unlucky, the first 1,000 sites) that pop up are nothing more than altie woo, shills selling alternative medicine and supplements, and CureZone or Whale.to wannabes? Here’s a useful tool. Le Canard Noir has […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Homeopathy deconstructed in the FASEB Journal

Well, this is encouraging to see: A scientific journal publishing an article debunking pseudoscience, in this case the pseudoscience of homeopathy. (Grrrlscientist might object to the use of Hogwarts in the title, in essence comparing homeopathy to the wizardry of Harry Potter’s world. So would I, actually. Such a comparison is an insult to Hogwarts.) […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery

Your Friday Dose of Woo: These boots were made for detoxifyin’

I tried not to write about the altie obsession with “detoxification” again. Really, I did. It gets repetitive, and I don’t want Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) to become to repetitive. Of course, a certain amount of repetitiveness is unavoidable, given that there are only a few major themes running through medical woo. First, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Thar’s gold in them thar “cures”

One of the favorite gambits that alternative medicine mavens like to use to defend their favorite remedies when a skeptic starts asking uncomfortably pointed and specific questions their scientific and evidentiary basis is to accuse said skeptic of being “in the pocket of big pharma.” Indeed, I’ve written before of the “pharma shill gambit,” where […]