Tag: Energy Healing
A Journalist Asks if Your Child Needs an Energy Healer. The Answer Probably Won’t Surprise You.
A healthcare journalist writing for a respected source of news for millions of people has penned an article that endorses pure quackery in the form of energy healing for kids.
Hopelessly Devoted to Woo: TLC and Forbes Bring Us Yet Another Celebrity Healer
Endorsed by journalists and studied by academic medicine, bogus celebrity energy healer Charlie Goldsmith now has his own television program. In other words, it's just another day at Science-Based Medicine.
The “Healing Codes” of Alex Loyd: Energy Healing with Words and Finger Exercises
Alex Loyd’s concept of “Healing Codes” is one of the most bizarre, ridiculous offshoots of so-called energy medicine. Loyd is a naturopath who has been criticized by “Dr. Joe” Schwarcz for recycling old bunk for profit. He claims that illness is due to disturbances in the human energy field and that the cells of our body store destructive energy patterns and all...
Astrology, Alchemy, ESP and Reiki. One Of These Is Not Like The Other
I knew that Jann was thinking of writing about reiki and fraud, but did not know the details of her most excellent discussion from yesterday until I had finished my penultimate draft for today. Think of them as a match set, two perspectives on the same elephant. Fraud: a person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being...
What Would It Take?
I recently wrote a SkepDoc column on fantasy physics in Skeptic magazine in which I mentioned a study that had allegedly measured 2 milligauss emanations from a healer’s hands. A reader inquired about it and went on to ask “what criteria is [sic] necessary for gaining acceptance in the scientific community in regards to purported healing processes using energy fields generated in...
Does thinking make it so? CAM placebo fantasy versus scientific reality
Last week, I discussed a rather execrable study. Actually, the study itself wasn’t so execrable, at least not in its design, which was a fairly straightforward three-arm randomized clinical trial. Rather it was the interpretation of the study’s results that was execrable. In brief, the authors tested an “energy healing” modality known as “energy chelation” versus a placebo (sham “energy chelation”) and...
Adventures in defending science-based medicine in cancer journals: Energy chelation
My co-bloggers and I have spent considerable time and effort over the last four years writing posts for this blog (and I for my not-so-super-secret other blog) bemoaning the infiltration of quackademic medicine into what once were bastions of evidence- and science-based medicine. We’ve discussed at considerable length reasons for why this steady infiltration of pseudoscience into medical academia has been occurring....
NIH Director Francis Collins doesn’t understand the problem with CAM
As the sole cancer surgeon among our stable of Science-Based Medicine (SBM) bloggers, I’m probably the most irritated at the infiltration of pseudoscience into academia (or, as we sometimes like to call it, quackademic medicine) in the realm of cancer. Part of the reason, of course, is that cancer is so common and that the consequences of adding pseudoscience to cancer therapy...
A homeopathy supporter notices our visit with the director of NCCAM
On April 2, Steve Novella, Kimball Atwood, and I visited the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to meet with its director, Dr. Josephine Briggs. I’m not going to rehash what was said because we agreed that Steve would handle that task, and he did so admirably last week. I agree with Steve that it was encouraging that Dr. Briggs...
Mainstream Media’s Sub-Par Health Coverage, Part 2
I recently wrote about an experience that I had with a reporter (Erica Mitrano) who interviewed me about energy healing at Calvert Memorial Hospital in southern Maryland. Erica was very friendly and inquisitive, and we had a nice conversation about the lack of scientific evidence supporting any energy healing modality. I thought it would be fun to post what we had discussed at SBM,...