The other day my friend Renee sent through this link, & her thoughts. "This article (& website) set my woo-ometer off big time," she said. The article’s entitled Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice, and begins thusly: Canadian researchers find a simple cure for cancer, but major pharmaceutical companies are not interested. Researchers at the […]
Continue readingYear: 2012
it must be the silly season
… not only do we have at least one homeopath using heat to treat burns (yes, really! That piece of burning stupid – to use an Oracian aphorism – is admirably covered here by Grant), but we also have the Daily Mail announcing that scientists have discovered – ta-daah! – a hangover cure (hat-tip to David […]
Continue readingSteve Novella’s BS detector
This week I’ve found myself becoming quite frustrated with the way alternative ‘therapies’ are being presented in the NZ Herald. Two of the three described to date are – as described – essentially massage therapies (as Michael Edmonds has noted here) & hardly need the overlay of pseudoscientific claims (unless, perhaps, to gain wider acceptability?). […]
Continue readingleeches & health – asking some questions
This morning’s Herald ran an article on ‘alternative therapies’ – New Zealanders’ beliefs about their effectiveness, & a Herald reporter’s experience of one such ‘therapy’. (Apparently there will be more to come over the next few days.) The article presented some results from a recent UMR research poll – as it was provided ‘exclusively to […]
Continue readingone reason many don’t ‘get’ science
Over at this post by Seth Mnookin** in the new HuffPo science section (like Orac I will be rather interested to see how this section pans out), a commenter with the ‘nym Seeking Clarity remarked: What our mainstream science education curricula apparently fails to adequately teach is why the process of science tends to produce information […]
Continue readinga homeopathic dinosaur?
I was reading Andy Lewis’s Quackometer blog while eating lunch & came across a reference to a homepathic preparation of Tyrannosaurus rex. Hoho, I thought, you are joking; please pull the other one. And then (being of curious persuasion & also it was still lunchtime) I decided to check it out. But no, it turns […]
Continue readingtime travellers i have met**
Via one of Orac’s commenters I happened on a webpage of this name. The page’s author is a hypnotherapist who describes his work as involving taking patients into their past lives (‘regressions’) and future lives (‘progressions’). Hence, I suppose, the ‘time travel’. And these supposed time travellers seem to be very advanced: Time travel will […]
Continue readingskulls & braaiiinz – what’s not to like? (also, plants)
The intrepid reporters from Number 8 Network e-mailed the other day. "What are you reading?" they asked; "after all, it’s the holidays & you must have heaps of time to put your nose in a book." Which is sort of right, it is the Christmas/New Year break, but the days just seem to fly by […]
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