Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

Faith healing everywhere in medical academia

When I’m trying to demonstrate the utter implausibility and mystical pseudoscience behind so much of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), which is now more commonly referred to (by its advocates, at least) as “integrative medicine,” I like to point to two examples in particular of modalities that are so utterly ridiculous in concept that anyone […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Popular culture

CVS, tobacco, and knee jerk reflexes

Now we come to a post in which Orac unloads a bit about one of his pet peeves. It is a post that will likely piss a few people off on “his” side. If it does, so be it. He does this now because yesterday something happened that irritated the crap out of me because […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Homeopathic ophthalmology and chromatotherapy? Keep my eyes away!

Contrary to what you might think, the longer I do this blogging thing, it doesn’t necessarily get easier. The reason, of course, is that after more than nine years of near daily posts there are days when it’s really hard to come up with something that really gets me fired up to do the hard […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Choosing Wisely about homeopathy, supplements, and "detoxification" quackery

One of the major differences between science-based medicine (SBM) and alternative medicine—or, as they call it these days, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine”—is that SBM is always questioning itself, always reevaluating its practices. Related to this difference is that SBM does change its practice, discarding treatments that don’t work and incorporating those […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Naturopathy Politics Quackery

Thanks to the U.S. Senate, the week of October 7 to 13, 2013 is now Quackery Week

Naturopathy is quackery. There, I said it. Actually, I’ve said it many times before, because it is. The problem with naturopathy, of course, is that it is so diffuse and encompasses so many different forms of quackery that it’s hard to categorize. Basically, it’s anything that can be portrayed as “natural,” be it traditional Chinese […]