Results for: homeopathy

Naturopaths and the anti-vaccine movement: Hijacking the law in service of pseudoscience

Time and time again, we’ve seen it. When pseudoscientists and quacks can’t persuade the scientific and medical community of the validity of their claims, they go to the law to try to gain the legitimacy that their claims can’t garner through proving themselves by the scientific method. True, purveyors of pseudoscience and unscientifically-derived medical practices do crave the respectability of science. That’s...

/ November 30, 2009

Conflicts of interest in science-based medicine

Science-based medicine is not perfect. Financial interests, conflicts of interest (COIs), and the pride of individual practitioners can at times undermine it. But it's so much better than any alternative we have tried before. It works, and, although it does so in fits and starts, sometimes all too slowly, it's getting better all the time. Dealing more effectively with COIs will only...

/ November 16, 2009

Pseudo-expertise versus science-based medicine

I am a skeptic. My support for science-based medicine, as important as it is and as much time, sweat, and treasure I spend supporting it, is not the be-all and end-all of my skepticism, which derives from a scientific world view. That’s why, every so often, I like to step back from medicine a bit and look at the broader picture. It’s...

/ November 9, 2009

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...

/ November 1, 2009

A Science Lesson from a Homeopath and Behavioral Optometrist

Charlene Werner is getting a lot of attention she probably did not anticipate or desire. She is the star of a YouTube video in which she explains the scientific basis of homeopathy. Before you watch it, make sure you are sitting down, relax, and brace yourself for an onslaught of profound scientific illiteracy combined with stunning arrogance. For those with more delicate...

/ October 28, 2009

Mixed Messages on Campus

The past two months have been my first time working in the hospital, as a third-year medical student in my Internal Medicine clerkship. It’s been exciting not only to see how medicine works but to be a part of the action! It really is striking to see the dramatic increases in proficiency and confidence with each stage of the training. From junior...

/ October 20, 2009

CFS: Viral vs somatization

If the association is confirmed, the finding will have near-revolutionary implications for our understanding disease – particularly infectious disease. If there is a confirmed model for such a vague set of symptoms signifying some occult infection limited to immune cells, which produces no repeatable cellular or antibody abnormality, no susceptibility to other infections (such as with HIV) and in which the sites...

/ October 14, 2009

The “Iron Rule of Cancer”: The dangerous cancer quackery that is the “German New Medicine”

Given that I trained as a cancer surgeon, do laboratory and translational cancer research, and spend my clinical time taking care of breast cancer patients, not surprisingly one topic that gets me the most irritated and provokes a lot of my verbiage for SBM is cancer quackery. As I was perusing my list of posts the other day, it occurred to me...

/ October 5, 2009

Infiltration of Quackademic Medicine into Mainstream: A pernicious influence

Editor’s note: Kausik Datta, Ph.D. is postdoctoral research fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He works in immunology, specifically as related to two major mycoses (Aspergillosis and Cryptococcosis). Rationality and skepticism have been his long-standing interests, which led him into science- and evidence-based medicine. This is his first contribution to this blog. Quackademic ‘Medicine’* is a collective of pseudoscientific, data-free,...

/ October 2, 2009

The Huffington Post is at it again

As many of our readers know, there are plenty of websites devoted entirely to fake medicine. Sites such as whale.to and NatrualNews are repositories of paranoid, unscientific thinking and promotion of dangerous health practices. Thankfully, they are rather fringe (but not fringe enough). More mainstream outlets print some pretty bad stuff, but it’s usually just lazy reporting and not a concerted, organized...

/ September 28, 2009