Category: Homeopathy
In honor of World Homeopathy Awareness Week 2010
Today, April 10, is the first day of World Homeopathy Awareness Week (WHAW), or, as I like to call it, World Sympathetic Magic Awareness Week. This week long “celebration” runs from today until April 16. Now, given the dim view of homeopathy which, I daresay, each and every blogger here at SBM shares, you’d think I wouldn’t want people to pay attention...
Our fearless leader Steve Novella gets the best responses to his posts!
You may recall that Steve has been criticizing a certain homeopath named John Benneth for his incredible flights of–shall we say?–fancy used in defending homeopathy. As a result, Mr. Benneth (whose website is called The Science of Homeopathy) has produced a series of amazing videos that he’s posted on YouTube. Although we have a very serious mission here at SBM, we are...
Placebo Effects Revisited
In the Wall Street Journal last week was a particularly bad article by Melinda Beck about acupuncture. While there was token skepticism (by Edzard Ernst, of course, who is the media’s go-to expert for CAM), the article credulously reported the marketing hype of acupuncture proponents. Toward the end of the article Beck admits that “some critics” claim that acupuncture provides nothing more...
The 2nd Yale Research Symposium on Complementary and Integrative Medicine. Part I
March 4, 2010 Today I went to the one-day, 2nd Yale Research Symposium on Complementary and Integrative Medicine. Many of you will recall that the first version of this conference occurred in April, 2008. According to Yale’s Continuing Medical Education website, the first conference “featured presentations from experts in CAM/IM from Yale and other leading medical institutions and drew national and international...
Homeopathy Gets a Reality Check in the UK
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (STC) has released a report, Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, in which they recommend that the NHS stop funding homeopathy. The report is a rare commodity – a thoroughly science-based political document. The committee went beyond simply stating that homeopathy does not work, and revealed impressive insight into the ethical, practical, and scientific problems caused...
The Winkler County nurse case and the problem of physician accountability
A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE THAT HAD A (SORT OF) HAPPY ENDING Back in September and then again last week, I wrote briefly (for me) about an incident that I considered to be a true miscarriage of justice, namely the prosecution of two nurses for having reported the dubious and substandard medical practices of a physician on the staff of Winkler County Hospital...
On the “individualization” of treatments in “alternative medicine”
One of the claims most frequently made by “alternative medicine” advocates regarding why alt-med is supposedly superior (or at least equal) to “conventional” medicine and should not be dismissed, regardless of how scientifically improbable any individual alt-med modality may be, is that the treatments are, if you believe many of the practitioners touting them, highly “individualized.” In other words, the “entire patient”...
Be careful what you wish for, Dr. Dossey, you just might get it
If there’s one thing about the so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) movement that I’ve emphasized time and time again, it’s that its adherents have a definite love-hate relationship with science. They hate it because it is the single greatest threat to their beliefs system and the pseudoscience that underlies it. At the same time, they crave the legitimacy that science confers....
Closing the Door on Homeopathy
Homeopathy, as a cultural phenomenon, remains an enigma. In the two centuries since its invention it has failed to garner significant scientific support. In fact, developments in physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine have shown the underlying concepts of homeopathy to be wrong – guesswork and speculation that lept in the wrong direction. It turns out, like does not cure like. This is...
When homeopaths attack medicine and physics
I must admit, it is possible that our fearless leader Steve has a more robust constitution than I do. I say this because he actually managed to sit through an entire video full of the most bizarre pseudoscience and mangling of physics and medicine that I’ve seen in quite some time. And that’s saying a lot. So, behold, Dr. Charlene Werner, an...