Brain-Based Learning, Myth versus Reality: Testing Learning Styles and Dual Coding
Ed. Note: Today we present a guest post from Josh Cuevas, a cognitive psychologist and assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of North Georgia. Enjoy! Breaking the cycle Since early on in graduate school when I began studying cognition, I’ve followed the learning styles movement because it was such a powerful phenomenon. It took hold rapidly, seemingly overnight,...
Delaying School Start Times for Sleep Deprived Teens
In August of this year, a new policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics was published which tackled the widespread problem of insufficient sleep in our adolescent population. They even went so far as to label insufficient sleep as “one of the most common, important, and potentially remediable health risks in children.” The statement, which gave a number of recommendations on...
Naturopathy vs. Science: Infertility Edition
This is another post in the naturopathy versus science series, where a naturopath’s advice is assessed against the scientific literature. It’s Naturopathic Medicine Week in the United States, so it’s time for another look at the alternative medicine practice that a friend of the blog likes to call the One Quackery to Rule them All. Naturopathy is an oddity among alternative medicine,...
The Miracle Cure for Everything
One common feature of pseudoscience is that proponents of a specific belief tend to exaggerate its scope and implications over time. In the world of physics this can eventually lead to a so-called “theory of everything” – one unifying theory that explains wide-ranging phenomena and displaces many established theories. In medicine this tendency to exaggerate leads in the direction of the panacea,...
Why Does This Immunologist Reject Vaccinations?
Vaccination is arguably medicine’s greatest success. It has eradicated smallpox and has saved millions from death and suffering from a growing list of preventable diseases. It’s surprising that it has so many critics. Most of them are either not educated in medical science (like Jenny McCarthy) or are educated but prefer to reject science in favor of anecdotal experience (like Jay Gordon)....
Breast cancer myths: No, antiperspirants do not cause breast cancer
Antivaccine activists frequently claim that aluminum salts used as adjuvants in vaccines cause autism. However, if you listen to the quacks and cranks, that's not all aluminum does. Oh, no, that nefarious metal is also being blamed for breast cancer. But don't throw away your antiperspirant just yet. The evidence cited to support this connection is utterly unconvincing. Much of it even...
Chaperones Needed. On acupuncture.
I receive a monthly newsletter from my medical board. Among other issues discussed are the results of disciplinary actions for physicians. Occasionally a physician who has boundary issues is required to have a chaperone present when doing exams. I was thinking that the concept of a chaperone could be more widely applicable. Consider “You Docs: Amazing acupuncture,” the latest from Drs Oz...
Yahoo News spews NaturalNews anti-vaccine (and other) propaganda
Yahoo News appears to have confused NaturalNews with actual news. It’s not. NaturalNews is the in-house propaganda organ for Mike Adams, whom I’ll introduce in a minute (although he needs no introduction for most readers here). A couple of recent examples: A recycled story, over a year old, from NaturalNews, appearing on Yahoo News last week. It starts out as...
Brain Research in the 21st Century
In April 2013 President Obama announced the BRAIN initiative – Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies – committing 100 million dollars to brain research. The goal of this initiative is to accomplish with the brain what the Human Genome Project accomplished with the human genome. The BRAIN project came after a similar, and larger, initiative in Europe – the European Union’s Human...
K2: The Vitamin, Not the Mountain
Science is complicated. Simple concepts that appear at first to be obviously true or untrue usually turn out to be more nuanced than we thought. Newtonian physics was taken as “the truth” until we learned in the 20th century that it didn’t apply on cosmological or subatomic scales. Medicine and human physiology are more complicated than most people realize or want to...
Don’t Blame the Patient