Tag: homeopathy
Good Thinking Society’s successful challenge to NHS homeopathy
[Editor’s note: For no reason whatsoever other than to share great news, we bring you this contribution from Michael Marshall, project director of the Good Thinking Society and vice president of the Merseyside Skeptics Society.] As regular readers of this blog may know, skeptics here in the UK have been campaigning for some time to end the funding of homeopathic remedies by...
Deconstructing Homeopathy Propaganda
The definition of “propaganda,” like so many things, is a bit fuzzy. The dictionary definition is: “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” There is no sharp demarcation line, however. Speech occurs on a spectrum from obsessively objective, fair, balanced, and scholarly at one end, to deliberately deceptive...
Pharmacy and homeopathy: Will the profession change, or will change be forced upon it?
Retail pharmacy is giving itself a credibility problem. While pharmacists are highly trusted health professionals, there are increasing questions about the products sold in pharmacies. Many of the non-prescription products that you can find aren’t backed by good evidence. And the number of dubious products seems to be growing. Homeopathy is an extreme example. Homeopathic “remedies” look like conventional medicine, but unlike...
Separating Fact from Fiction in Pediatric Medicine: Facial Nerve Palsy
There are numerous medical conditions that are seemingly designed to allow proponents of “irregular medicine” to proclaim their treatments to be effective. These conditions tend to be chronic and subjective in nature, or to have waxing and waning courses such that a parent or patient might easily be fooled into assigning a causal relationship between a bogus intervention and a clinical improvement....
A systematic review about nothing
There is dubious content in PubMed that you won’t find unless you look for it, or stumble across it inadvertently. It’s the entire field of alternative medicine which is abstracted and complied along with the actual medical literature. In this world, the impossible is accepted as fact, and journal articles focus on the medical equivalent of counting angels on pinheads. I’ve been...
Australia’s New Antiscience Party
In a perfect world, high quality science would inform politics and policy. Science cannot determine policy by itself because there are also value judgments and trade-offs that need to be negotiated. At the least, however, policy should be consistent with the best available science. We, of course, don’t live in a perfect world. Too often politics and ideology seem to inform, or...
Nobody licenses quacks in my state! HB 4531 and the licensing of naturopaths in Michigan
Over the years, I’ve taken care of women with locally advanced breast cancer so advanced that it’s eroded through the skin, forming huge, nasty ulcers filled with stinky dead cancer tissue that’s outgrown its blood supply, leaving the patient in chronic pain. If the patient is fortunate, her cancer has not metastasized beyond her axillary lymph nodes (the lymph nodes under her...
Legislative Alchemy: Michigan House Bill 4531 gives naturopaths a broad scope of practice
Michigan House Bill 4531, if passed, would give naturopaths one of the broadest scopes of practice in the U.S., essentially equaling that of a family practice MD or DO. The bill made it through all the necessary House committees and is now before the House for an initial vote determining whether it will proceed further in that body. If it passes there,...
The “Incoherent Mess” That Is Homeopathy: Old and New Insights
Back in 1943 a Dutch physician, David Karel de Jongh, wrote a PhD dissertation on homeopathy. It was based on his experience working in a homeopathic hospital and on all the published information he could find, and was highly critical of homeopathy. It was an impressive opus, with over 200,000 words. It is way too long for the average reader to wade...
Medical exemptions to vaccine mandates for sale after SB277! Get ’em before they’re gone!
When California passed SB 277 into law, eliminating personal belief exemptions to school vaccine requirements and permitting only personal medical exemptions, I predicted that antivaccine quacks would start issuing bogus medical exemptions. Unfortunately, I was right.