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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Quackery

Representative Dan Burton’s last antivaccine hurrah is scheduled for November 29

Whenever I blog about atrocities against science like the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I’m frequently asked how just such an edifice designed to promote pseudoscience could have come to be as a full-fledged center in the National Institutes of Health. The answer is simple and boils down to woo-loving legislators. In […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Quackery

The “success” of NCCAM grants on homeopathy

One of the great benefits of having been a blogger for nearly eight years now is that I now have a rich history of thousands of posts. True, there are the occasional posts that I wish I hadn’t written and even the occasional post that I consider to be not particularly good, but for the […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

The results of the unethical and misbegotten Trial to Asess Chelation Therapy (TACT) are finally revealed

Chelation therapy, in my somewhat Insolent opinion, is pure quackery. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most common quackeries out there, used by a wide variety of practitioners for a wide variety of ailments blamed on “heavy metal toxicity.” Chelation therapy involves using chemicals that can bind to the metal ions and allow them to […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

What is the role of NCCAM at the NIH? Dr. Killen tries to explain.

I’d like to publicly thank Dr. John Killen, Jr. I was looking for something to write about yesterday evening, and, just when I was beginning to despair that I might have to do another post on the lunacy that is antivaccine nonsense (even I get tired of taking on antivaccine idiocy, as regular readers know), […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Can we? (2012 edition)

I sense a disturbance in the skeptical blogosphere. It is something that I half-expected, but, even so, it nonetheless somewhat surprised me when it arrived in the form of comments on my blog and e-mails from readers, fellow supporters of science-based medicine, and others asking me what I thought. In a way, it makes me […]