Tag: quackery
Crowdfunding: The fuel for cancer quackery
Ever since I first started taking notice about cancer quacks like Stanislaw Burzynski, I noticed how crowdfunding using social media and sites like GoFundMe appear to be an integral part of the business model of quack clinics. Thanks to an investigation by The Good Thinking Society published in BMJ last week, I now have a feel for the scope of the problem....
You can’t breathe through your stomach
Some bottle water is claimed to have extra oxygen which is claimed to give a performance benefit. Are these claims valid?
J.B. Handley versus vaccine science. Again. Not surprisingly, J.B. loses.
Our old friend anti antivaccine activist J. B. Handley invokes the "vaccines didn't save us" gambit. It doesn't go well for him.
Science-based medicine versus other ways of knowing
It has been our position that science is the most effective means of determining medical treatments that work and whose benefits outweigh their risks. Those who promote pseudoscientific or prescientific medicine, however, frequently appeal to other ways of knowing, often ancient knowledge from other cultures and pointing out deficiencies in SBM to justify promoting their treatments. Do their justifications hold water?
Right-to-try is now law. Let patients beware!
Last week, President Trump signed the worst federal right-to-try bill under consideration by Congress into law. Its purpose was never to help terminally ill patients, and now that it's law there will be nothing the FDA can do to protect vulnerable terminally ill patients who choose it. That's a feature, not a bug. That's because right-to-try is the result of a collaboration...
The Null hypothesis: Gary Null attacks science-based medicine
Over the last couple of weeks, one of the old men of quackery, Gary Null, has decided (yet again) that he really, really doesn't like science-based medicine. That includes Steve Novella, Susan Gerbic, and...me. As is his usual habit, Null teamed up with his producer Richard Gale and wrote some seriously off-base screeds against Wikipedia, skeptics, and science-based medicine, basically the forces...
PLOS ONE, peer review, and a “crappy” acupuncture study
Meta-analyses can sometimes suffer from the "GIGO problem" (garbage in, garbage out). The publication of a "crappy" acupuncture "network meta-analysis" for acupuncture and chronic constipation illustrates the GIGO problem on steroids and reveals a problem with peer review.
Homeopathy, rabid dogs, and naturopathic propaganda
Last week, a story of a bizarre homeopathic remedy used by a Canadian naturopath made the news. Today, American naturopaths are in Washington, DC lobbying for increased prescribing power, including for controlled substances. Lawmakers should be reminded of the quackery at the heart of naturopathy.
Homeopathy Awareness Week shows that homeopathy is still a problem
Homeopathy Awareness Week might be almost over, but The One Quackery To Rule Them All wastes resources and endangers patients year round, and a recent French criticism of homeopathy has provoked another case of legal thuggery by homeopaths.
The deadly false hope of German alternative cancer clinics
We at SBM have written about German cancer clinics that offer a combination of cancer quackery, some real medicine, plus unproven experimental therapies, all at a high cost, both financially and in false hope. Finally, an exposé of these clinics has been published. What these clinics are doing is even worse than even we had feared.