Categories
Bioethics Medicine Religion

Do God and prayer trump scientific medicine?

Late this afternoon, I happened to be sitting in my office perusing the websites for the latest batch of surgical journals, trying desperately to catch up on my reading, something that I, like most academic surgeons, am chronically behind in, when I happened upon the website of the Archives of Surgery. There, the lead article […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A ghoul descends upon Christina Applegate’s “maimed” body

This is getting to be nauseatingly frequent. As my blog bud Mark Hoofnagle pointed out, the hard-core “alternative medicine” mavens, in particular that despicable promoter of quackery and distrust of scientific medicine who runs one of the two or three largest repositories of antiscience and quackery in existence, Mike Adams, seem to have decided that […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Viruses are “molecular acids”?

I feel a bit bad this week. You see, since Tuesday I’ve been pretty much wallowing in some of the most outrageous woo, antiscience, and abuses of logic and reason I’ve ever come across, courtesy of the merry band of clueless antivaccinationists over at Age of Autism. I had thought that I should try to […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Yawn. Yet another worthless acupuncture study for hot flashes in breast cancer patients

Here we go again. Tuesday night and yesterday, you probably saw it, plastered all over the media, in the newspapers, on ABC, on the radio, in press releases, and around the blogosphere. Yes, it was another bit of science by press release, with news outlets practically falling all over themselves to hype the results of […]

Categories
Biology Medicine

Obesity and diet: The first law of thermodynamics doesn’t entirely apply?

Remember Sandy Szwarc of Junkfood Science? It’s been a long time since we’ve last encountered her. Indeed, it was last year when there developed a debate on whether her posts were suitable for the Skeptics’ Circle. At the time, I was conflicted. In many ways, Ms. Szwarc seemed to be a skeptic–at least, when it […]