Here’s an article describing the horrendous and barbaric treatment of bears harvested for various medicinal use particularly in Asia and the Far East:
Article by Kulvinder Singh Matharu – 2011
DC’s Improbable Science provides an update on the so-called “College of Medicine”:
I share DC’s despair; the “College of Medicine” is really nothing more than a reincarnation of the decrepitude and morally bankrupt Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Integrated Health. I originally called the “College of Medicine” the “College of Un-medicine”. DC goes further and believes that "Antiscientific Council" would be a more apt description.
There is an established self-correcting process called the “scientific method” which helps us to determine what is medicine and what is bullshit. Ben Goldacre’s book “Bad Science” cuts through all the nonsense and gets straight to the point; the need for proper scientific trials. And by proper, this means: large scale, randomised, double-blinded, controlled, peer-reviewed and repeatable (using a systematic approach undertaken by the excellent and valuable Cochrane Collaboration).
Those that do not correctly follow the scientific approach and who try to foster us with unproven or demonstrably non-efficacious medical treatments are liable to be called quacks. At best.
Here’s a very short BBC Radio 4 audio of Ben Goldacre explaining the creation of the Cochrane Collaboration:
Article by Kulvinder Singh Matharu – 2010
The sad thing is that people buy into this crystal/energy/frequency nonsense:
Here’s an earlier related article:
Quackery? Scam? You decide.
Article by Kulvinder Singh Matharu – 2010
Oh dear. Looks like more nonsense from Prince Charles’s associates.
Read it, and despair. Perhaps it should have been called the College of Un-medicine!
Article by Kulvinder Singh Matharu – 2010
Science-Based Medicine has done some fantastic research on various medical-based articles and the misinformation that these articles promulgate. The Science-Based Medicine article Medical Voices: Always in Error, Never in Doubt at http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=5734 contains the details.
The article begins:
I have discussed two articles from the web site Medical Voices, one with 9 questions, the other on mumps. There are, I think, 18 web pages of articles about vaccines on that web site. I am uncertain as to the true number of pages of information as the navigation buttons at the bottom of the pages do not always seem to function correctly. That such a problem exists suggests that no one has bothered, like me, to go through the web site to read all the essays. Or maybe it is me and the price of using the Chrome browser. Anyway, there are a large collection of essays that serves as a rich vein of iron pyrite to mine for topics. At about 5 entries to a page, evaluating at a pace of about one monthly, it would take years to analyze all the misinformation on Medical Voices.
It occurs to me that at the center of each article is a nut of misinformation (or sometimes as many as nine) that serves as the core fallacy of that article. I want to emphasize that I am using ‘nut’ as a metaphor for seed, not in its other, more colloquial, meaning. So rather than an in-depth evaluation of each article (although some will warrant a future, more through review), I thought it would be interesting to identify the nut in each article and why it is wrong. So, in the spirit, but not the intellectual rigor, of Generation Rescue’s “14 Studies“, let’s sort through the nuts …
There’s quite a lot there but well worth a read.
Article by Kulvinder Singh Matharu – 2010
Over at DC’s Improbable Science there is an article discussing some nonsense being taught at Middlesex University…well, not just nonsense but dangerous nonsense. Science it ain’t.
More info at http://www.dcscience.net/?p=2923 More quackedemia. Dangerous Chinese medicine taught at Middlesex University
Article by Kulvinder Singh Matharu – 2010
Excellent Science-based Medicine article on the recent Parliament report on homeopathy at http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3961
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (STC) has released a report, Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, in which they recommend that the NHS stop funding homeopathy. The report is a rare commodity – a thoroughly science-based political document.
The article goes on to discuss the denials, lies and misdirection employed by those with a vested interest in promulgating and defending homeopathy. Highly recommended reading.
Article by Kulvinder Singh Matharu – 2010
The ever reliable fount of reason and quack-busting, The Quackometer has an interesting article on certain Chinese herbal medicines being dosed with pharmaceutical ingredients that are four times that found in legally prescribed medicines. Be aware.
Article by Kulvinder Singh Matharu – 2009