Month: August 2014

Left Brain – Right Brain Myth

Years of analyzing popular but dubious claims leads to the impression that just about all knowledge that filters down to the popular consciousness is essentially wrong, at least as a first approximation. This may sound cynical, but think about any area in which you have specialized knowledge and compare that to what the average person believes about that area. Now extrapolate that...

/ August 6, 2014

Misguided Naturopath Claims To Have Cured Cervical Dysplasia

Naturopath Kate Whimster has written a case study of a patient with cervical dysplasia who was allegedly treated successfully with naturopathic treatment. She says: In many cases conventional treatment can be invasive, ineffective, or can put patients at risk for future complications. Fortunately, there are wonderful naturopathic treatment options available both instead of or in conjunction with conventional medical treatments. This case...

/ August 5, 2014

Ebola outbreaks: Science versus fear mongering and quackery

“Ebola virus particles” by Thomas W. Geisbert, Boston University School of Medicine – PLoS Pathogens, November 2008 doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1000225. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons. Without a doubt the big medical story of the last week or so has been the ongoing outbreak of Ebola virus disease in West Africa, the most deadly in history thus far. Indeed, as of this...

/ August 4, 2014

Dental Management Of Obstructive Sleep Apnea

[Editor’s Note: I’m pleased to announce that Grant Ritchey has agreed to join SBM as a regular. He’ll be writing about dental science and pseudoscience every four weeks on Sunday. (I swear, we’ll get up to seven day a week publishing if it kills me—or the other bloggers.) Grant will be starting with science, but I’m sure he’ll soon be discussing all...

/ August 3, 2014

Cold reality versus the wishful thinking of cryonics

We all seek immortality in some way. Death has been one of the prime terrors haunting us since humans first started realizing that every living thing dies and death is permanent. After all, no one wants to face the end of everything that one has been, is, and will be. Indeed, a key feature of many religions is a belief that death...

/ August 2, 2014

Should the Incidental Discovery of Nonparentage be Disclosed?

The July issue of Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, contains an extremely thought provoking article discussing the risks and benefits of disclosing an incidental finding of nonparentage during pediatric genetic testing. Nonparentage occurs when one, or very rarely both, of the social parents did not serve as source code for a child’s genetic programming, so to speak....

/ August 1, 2014