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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Music Popular culture Quackery

Has another celebrity embraced quackery?

I never in a million years thought I’d be writing a blog post involving Selena Gomez. Gomez, as many, if not most, of you are probably aware is currently a young pop star and actress who got her start as a child actress. Oddly enough, she was on Barney & Friends with Demi Lovato. These […]

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Medicine

My last word (I hope): Michael Phelps, cupping, and "integrative medicine"

As I mentioned yesterday, there are news events involving medicine (more specifically pseudoscience in medicine) that are so ubiquitous and irritating that they’re enough to bring me briefly out of my vacation to bang out a quick post. So it was when I wrote my post yesterday about Michael Phelps’ enthusiasm for cupping, a practice […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Sports

Thanks, Michael Phelps, for glamorizing cupping quackery!

So, in case you hadn’t noticed, I was taking a brief vacation, a long weekend if you will. As a result, I hadn’t planned on posting new completely original material until Wednesday or Thursday. (Monday’s post, some of you noticed, was a modified crosspost from my not-so-super-secret other blog.) Then something happened.

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

The VA and Dr. Tracy Gaudet: Integrating quackery into the care of veterans

I was originally going to write this post for the 4th of July, given the subject matter. However, as regular readers know, I am not unlike Dug the Dog in the movie Up, with new topics that float past me in my social media and blog reading rounds serving as the squirrel. But never let […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Quackademic medicine and acupressure at my alma mater

Given the study that I’m going to discuss, I can’t help but start out with a brief (for me) reminiscence. Longtime readers know that I graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in the late 1980s. Back when I attended U. of M., its medical school was considered stodgy and hard core even by […]