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Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The World Health Organization: Integrating quackery into the ICD-11

ICD-10 is a standardized system of alphanumeric codes for diagnoses maintained by the World Health Organization used throughout the world for billing, epidemiology, research, and cataloging causes of death. Its successor, ICD-11, is nearing completion, and unfortunately appears to be taking the “integration” of traditional medicine to a whole new level by integrating quack diagnoses with real diagnoses.

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Medicine Popular culture Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Bee venom acupuncture: Deadly quackery that can kill

Bee venom acupuncture is a form of apitherapy (treatment with bee products, such as venom, honey, or pollen) in which bee venom is injected along acupuncture points, often by actual bees. It also recently resulted in the death of a woman from anaphylactic shock. Basically, the use of bee venom acupuncture cannot be justified because it has no proven benefits and is potentially deadly.

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Bad science Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

The Global Coherence Initiative: Woo on a global scale

The HeartMath Institute runs a project that it calls the Global Coherence Initiative. It’s main idea is that we are all interconnected, including through the earth’s electromagnetic field. Unfortunately, Scientific Reports published some bad science whose purpose is to support Deepak Chopra-level woo.

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Medicine

Senator Patrick Colbeck’s embrace of pseudoscience goes farther than I thought

My state senator, Patrick Colbeck, has repeatedly sided with antivaxers in promoting legislation that would make it easier to get personal belief exemptions to school vaccine mandates. Now I find out that he’s an “electromagnetic hypersensitivity” crank as well. And he’s running for governor.

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Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Biodynamic farming: Like anthroposophic medicine, only on the farm

Rudolf Steiner had a farm, and on that farm he had some woo. It is called biodynamic farming, and what woo it is!