We get mail
There are a few “laws” of the blogosphere, one of them being that a response to a post that comes more than a few weeks later is generally useless or crazy. But once in a while, someone takes the time to look at an old post and formulate a thoughtful response. This is not one of those times. Or maybe it is....
Kudos to Steven Novella
It has just been announced, in the July/August issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, that our own Steven Novella has been awarded the 2010 Robert P. Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking. It will be formally presented at the CSIcon conference in New Orleans on October 28, 2011. The Prize is a $1500 award given to the author of the published work or body of work that...
Acupuncturist’s Unconvincing Attempt at Damage Control
Acupuncture has been in the news recently. A former President of South Korea had to undergo major surgery to remove an acupuncture needle that had somehow lodged in his lung. A recent study in Pain compiled a list of 95 published reports of serious complications of acupuncture including 5 deaths. Meanwhile, acupuncturists continue to insist that their procedures are “safe.” Edzard Ernst et...
Blatant pro-alternative medicine propaganda in The Atlantic
Some of my fellow Science-Based Medicine (SBM) bloggers and I have been wondering lately what’s up with The Atlantic. It used to be one of my favorite magazines, so much so that I subscribed to it for roughly 25 years (and before that I used to read my mother’s copy). In general I enjoyed its mix of politics, culture, science, and other...
The Dow of Accutane
At home the kids current TV show of choice is How I Met Your Mother, supplanting Scrubs as the veg out show in the evening. Both shows are always on a cable channel somewhere and are often broadcast late at night. Late night commercials can be curious, and as I work on projects, I watch the shows and commercials out of the...
Exorcism and Sorcery as Health Benefits?!
Luis Fernando Verissimo, a Brazilian writer, once proposed “voodoopuncture”. Instead of going to the acupuncturist, you would be treated without leaving home. The voodoopuncturist would stick acupuncture needles in the voodoo dolls of you! I add that voodoopuncture could be outsourced to Haiti and/or China. It is a win-win-win situation! — Leonardo Monasteri, Brazilian economist As unbelievable as this might sound, “voodoopuncture”...
The Value of Replication
Daryl Bem is a respected psychology researcher who decided to try his hand at parapsychology. Last year he published a series of studies in which he claimed evidence for precognition — for test subjects being influenced in their choices by future events. The studies were published in a peer-reviewed psychology journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This created somewhat of...
Autism and Prenatal Vitamins
Science has found no evidence that vaccines cause autism; but the true cause(s) of autism have not yet been determined. So far the available evidence has pointed towards a largely genetic cause with possible interaction with environmental factors. A new study supports that interpretation. It also supports previous evidence that autism is triggered prior to birth, rather than at the time of...
Science-based medicine, skepticism, and the scientific consensus
Editor’s note: This weekend was a big grant writing weekend for me. I’m resubmitting my R01, which means that between now and July 1 or so, my life is insanity, as I try to rewrite it into a form that has a fighting chance of being in the top 7%, which is about the level the NCI is funding at right now....
The impact of antivaccination lobbying
Here’s an excellent news report from Australia on the human costs of the anti-vaccine movement: The video features Viera Scheibner, who has nothing good to say about vaccines and thinks that vaccines are dangerous and infectious diseases in childhood are good. It also features the stories of children who caught vaccine-preventable diseases. This is how it’s done.