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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

“Misinformed consent” rears its ugly head in Pediatrics

I’ve written about the concept of “misinformed” consent with respect to the anti-vaccine movement. To summarize, “misinformed consent” is a perversion of the concept of informed consent in which cranks claim to be championing true informed consent (and, by implication, that opponents have not) when in fact they are presenting a scientifically unsupportable assessment of […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Weekend mailbag: A most telling comment

Here’s a rather interesting (and telling) comment that, because it showed up on an old post, many readers might have missed: As a practicing acupuncturist I can only say that my sham techniques have frequently and often created such a powerful placebo effect that many patients coming to my office having exhausted “allopathic” cures find […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Another pointless “acupuncture” study misinterpreted

At the risk of once again irritating long time readers who’ve hear me say this before, I can’t resist pointing out that, of all the various forms of “alternative medicine” other than herbal medicines (many of which are drugs, just adulterated, impure drugs), acupuncture was the one treatment that, or so I thought, might actually […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy

Yes, there really are people who don’t accept the germ theory of disease

The longer I’m in this whole skepticism thing, the more I realize that no form of science is immune to woo. For example, even though I lament just how many people do not accept evolution, for example, I can somewhat understand it. Although the basics of the science and evidence supporting the theory of evolution […]