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Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery

The Huffington Post delves deeper into the woo

Since its very inception, the Huffington Post has been a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. Shortly after that, antivaccine woo-meisters like David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kimg Stagliano, and, apparently, one of the editors (Special Projects Editor Rachel Sklar) were joined by all-purpose woo-meisters like Deepak Chopra. True, for a brief period of time there […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Science

Academia: Slowing down the search for cures?

I was very happy with NEWSWEEK recently, specifically because of its lengthy expose of Oprah Winfrey and her promotion of pseudoscience, mysticism, and quackery on her talk show. However, I haven’t always been that thrilled with NEWSWEEK’s coverage of medicine and science. For example, NEWSWEEK’s science columnist Sharon Begley has gotten on my nerves on […]

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

The cranks pile on John Ioannidis’ work on the reliability of science

Pity poor John Ioannidis. The man does provocative work about the reliability of scientific studies as published in the peer-reviewed literature, and his reward for trying to point out shortcomings in how we as scientists and clinical researchers do studies and evaluate evidence is to be turned into an icon for cranks and advocates of […]

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Biology Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking Surgery

Popularity versus reliability in medical research

Two of the major themes on this blog since the very beginning has been the application of science- and evidence-based medicine to the care of patients and why so much of so-called “complementary and alternative” medicine, as well as fringe movements like the anti-vaccine movement, have little or–more commonly–virtually no science to support their claims […]