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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

“Disruptive” functional medicine at the Cleveland Clinic: Disrupting medicine by mixing quackery with it

That the Cleveland Clinic has become one of the leading institutions, if not the leading institution, in embracing quackademic medicine is now indisputable. Indeed, 2017 greeted me with a reminder of just how low the Clinic has gone when the director of its Wellness Institute published a blatantly antivaccine article for a local publication, which […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The American College of Physicians integrates quackery with medicine in its recommendations for managing back pain

One of the overarching themes of this blog, if not the overarching theme, is to expose and combat the infiltration of quackery into medicine. What I’m referring to, of course, is the phenomenon that’s risen over the last 25 years or so in which various pseudoscientific alternative medicine therapies (but I repeat myself) have found […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

First China, next the world: The Chinese government gives a big boost to traditional Chinese medicine, just like Chairman Mao did

Everything old is new again in China. Just as Chairman Mao promoted the “integration” of traditional Chinese medicine with “Western” medicine 65 years ago, the Chinese government today is doing the same thing for the same reasons.

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Selling an alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial as an “N-of-1” trial: Integrative medicine’s new propaganda technique?

If there’s one thing that proponents of “integrative medicine” (or, as it’s been called in the past, “complementary and alternative medicine,” or CAM) take great pains to emphasize whenever defending their integration of prescientific and pseudoscientific medicine into medicine, it’s that they do not recommend using “alternative medicine” instead of real medicine but in addition […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Does thinking make it so? The placebo myth rears its ugly head again.

Blogging is a funny thing. Sometimes the coincidence involved is epic. For instance, as I do on many Mondays, yesterday I crossposted a modified and updated version of a post from a week ago from my not-so-super-secret other blog. This time around, it just so happened to be a post about what I like to […]