Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Adventures in bad veterinary medicine reported by the local media (2017 edition)

Just because people think that sticking needles into their meridians will somehow unblock their qi and fix whatever ails them doesn’t mean it’s OK to inflict the same nonsense on our pets. Unfortunately, a local TV station disagrees.

Categories
Biology Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The Galileo Gambit: Just because your quackery is rejected by the establishment does not make you Galileo or Semmelweis

Quacks love to invoke experts who made predictions that turned out to be wrong or point to Galileo or Semmelweis as examples of scientists whose findings were rejected by the scientific or medical establishment of the time, as though poor prediction or rejection by the establishment means there must be something to their science. Guess what? As Michael Shermer put it, heresy does not equal correctness.

Categories
Religion Science Surgery

An uncomfortable question when you least expect it

When you’re in an exam room with a patient, sometimes you’re forced to contemplate uncomfortable questions.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

How do we resist the rising tide of antiscience and pseudoscience?

The impetus for the creation of this blog, lo these 12+ years ago, was growing alarm at the rising tide of pseudoscience then, such as quackery, antivaccine misinformation, creationism, Holocaust denial, and many other forms of attacks on science, history, and reality itself. I had cut my teeth on deconstructing such antiscience and pseudoscience on […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The American College of Physicians integrates quackery with medicine in its recommendations for managing back pain

One of the overarching themes of this blog, if not the overarching theme, is to expose and combat the infiltration of quackery into medicine. What I’m referring to, of course, is the phenomenon that’s risen over the last 25 years or so in which various pseudoscientific alternative medicine therapies (but I repeat myself) have found […]