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

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Help me Obi-Wan. You’re my only hope.

In the year and a half or so that I’ve been doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I must admit that I’ve come across some truly weird stuff. Stuff so weird that, after reading it, you wonder either, “How on earth could someone seriously think something like this is true or would work?” or “How […]

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History Hitler Zombie Holocaust Politics World War II

Far, far, sooner than expected, the monster returns to invade the Presidential campaign

Deep underneath the brick and steel of a nondescript building somewhere in Manhattan, within the very bowels of the city itself, not far from the Seed mothership, Orac waited. After over a year’s absence, the monster had returned to consume the most unpalatable brain of a former Nixon speechwriter who had decided that he knew […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Senator Tom Harkin: NCCAM and inviting the Four Horsemen of the Woo-pocalypse into the Senate

Yesterday, I wrote about Senator Tom Harkin’s (D-IA) little woo-fest in the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which he called Integrative Care: A Pathway to a Healthier Nation. I and a lot of the rest of the medical blogosphere (such as PalMD, Val Jones, and Tufted Titmouse) shook our heads in disbelief […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery Television

Well, well, well, well…look who’s a pharma shill now!

Because of my stands against dubious medical “therapies” and outright quackery and for science- and evidence-based medicine, I have been the frequent target of what I’ve come to call the “pharma shill gambit.” It’s a pretty stupid and common ad hominem attack in which the attacker, virtually always an advocate of “complementary and alternative medicine” […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A mathematical model for the persistence of quackery

I’m sure it’s obvious that I’m often puzzled (and, I daresay, many other skeptics and boosters of science- and evidence-based medicine are puzzled too) over why various forms of quackery and woo that have either about as close to zero prior probability as one can imagine and/or (more frequently “and”) have failed to show evidence […]