homeopathy
oracknows | February 22, 2010Sometimes politicians actually get it right.
I know, I know, it makes me choke on my words to admit it, but sometimes politicians can actually get science right. I'm referring to something that happened in the U.K., yesterday, when the Science and Technology Select Committee delivered its verdict on homeopathy. Indeed, the Committee has gone so far as to call for the complete withdrawal of NHS funding and official licensing for homeopathy. The report is called Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, and I'll cut to the chase. This is what the report concluded:
By providing homeopathy on the NHS and…
oracknows | January 19, 2010I'd like to start this post by thanking a commenter named Paul Grenville. He provided me with this blogging material and, indeed, may have supplied me with material for two blog posts. He did it by showing up in an old post about a homoepath named Jeremy Sherr, who has been bringing woo to the natives, so to speak, by treating HIV/AIDS patients in Africa with homeopathy. Sherr, as you may recall, Sherr had announced his plans to do "clinical trials" using homeopathy for HIV/AIDS and even bragged about treating Tanzanians with quackery. He then tried--shall we say?--to revise history by making…
palmd | December 2, 2009Remember the Zicam debacle? To catch you up, Zicam has been promoted for years as a "homeopathic cold remedy". It is of course neither. Since it contains measurable amounts of zinc, it isn't "homeopathic", and since there is no cure for the common cold, it's not a remedy. In addition to having neither of it's promoted qualities, the FDA has received hundreds of reports of people losing their sense of smell (became "anosmic") after using intranasal Zicam. As Steve Novella has pointed out, there is some scientific evidence pointing to a causal connection between zinc and anosmia. Now…
terrasig | May 4, 2009My clinical counterpart, surgical oncologist Dr David Gorski, has an excellent post up today at Science-Based Medicine on the irresponsible and misleading information being provided at The Huffington Post during the current H5N1/2009 influenza ("swine flu") outbreak. "The Huffington Post's War on Medical Science: A Brief History" provides a cautionary tale for us in embracing web-based news sources as our excellent print newspapers are going by the wayside.
Within the post, Dr Gorski shows that he is even more familiar with my writing than myself by citing a post at the old Terra Sig on the…
oracknows | April 17, 2009I've complained about it time and time again because it's annoyed me time and time again. Specifically, I'm talking about how various news outlets report scientific studies involving so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), sometimes called "integrative medicine" (IM), the latter of which I like to refer to adding a bit of woo to make the scientific medicine go down. In general, because the press likes stories that buck the establishment, it tends to favor studies that seem to show that CAM modalities work. Even worse, it tends to misinterpret negative studies in the most…
palmd | April 13, 2009One of the common themes in biology and medicine is the feeling that somehow there must be more. Creationist cults simply know that life must be more than matter, and mind-body dualists (which includes most alternative medicine advocates) are certain that humans are more than an "ugly bag of mostly water" (sorry for the geek reference). If you can stick with me here, I'll explain to you a bit of the history surrounding this fallacy.
Most of us intuitively feel that we are both a body and a person. In every day life, it makes a certain operational sense to think of our "mind" as being…
oracknows | April 8, 2009You be the judge!
Clicking on the picture will lead you to a blog post where you can download a high resolution version suitable for printing up and either distributing or putting up on a bulletin board or wall. I particularly like that it was made by The American Institute for the Destruction of Tooth Fairy Science.
My only objection to the poster is the use of the word "shit." Don't get me wrong here. Yes, it's accurate. Yes, it's appropriate. No, I'm not some sort of prude who never uses the word and wilts at the very sight or sound of it. My problem with it is that its inclusion on the…
amillikan | March 21, 2009
ScienceBloggers Peter Lipson, AKA Dr. Pal from White Coat Underground, and Janet Stemwedel, AKA Dr. Free-Ride from Adventures in Ethics and Science, return for another episode of BhTV's Science Saturday this week. They discuss Senator Tom Harkin's worrisome crusade to "validate" alternative medicine, debate whether scientists should bother to rigorously investigate popular junk science, explain why doctors should exhibit humility in the face of disease, and issue a call for scientists to get political.
Related ScienceBlogs Posts:
Peter on Tom Harkin's war on science
Janet on conventional…
sb admin | April 11, 2008Skepchick has apparently discovered that, as of yesterday, this is World Homeopathy Awareness Week. (Yes, starts on a Thursday...they were going to start on Monday, but the succussion took a while.)
Well, I can get behind a public service like this. My contribution will be a side-to-side comparison of a homeopathic treatment and a real one. Let's pick a fun disease, say, heart attacks (the website I found offered homeopathic remedies for anthrax, but I think I'll skip that).
Unfortunately, this will require a brief tutorial on myocardial infarctions (MIs, heart attatcks). As is usual with…