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

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Realigning your frequency, triphase style

If there’s one concept that seems to cross many “disciplines” of woo (a.k.a. “alternative medicine,” a.k.a. “complementary and alternative medicine,” a.k.a. CAM) is the concept of some sort of “life force” or “life energy.” It is true that life does depend upon the utilization of energy, specifically chemical energy. That’s what biologists and biochemists mean […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion

The Catholic Church versus Reiki

Nearly two weeks ago, P.Z. Myers mentioned a story that would normally have provoked a post by me. Specifically, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had issued a warning against the use of reiki as being unscientific, unproven, and, worse, “dangerous to Christian spiritual health.” Unfortunately, this story came out right before Autism Awareness Month […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

In which I echo PalMD…

Blog bud PalMD was asked this most difficult question: A colleague of mine asked a great question: if you have one question to ask a booster of so-called alternative medicine in a public forum, what should it be? To which he responded: My answer: “Can you please give specific examples of alternative medicine theories and […]

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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 […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The infiltration of woo into medical academia continues apace

Here we go again. As regular readers know, I’ve lamented long and loud the infiltration of unscientific “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM, or what Dr. RW dubbed “quackademic medicine, a term I very much like) into medical school curricula, academic medical centers, and postgraduate medical education. A while back, in particular, I got rather worked […]