It’s official. Energy healing, distance healing, and magnet therapy don’t work. Likewise, saw palmetto won’t help your prostate problem and Black cohosh won’t help for menopausal hot flashes.
The US government has spent around 2.5 billion (a drop in the ocean these days) running controlled studies on alternative medicine, and found that most of it is [...]
Political blog Huffington Post is credulous of all kinds of woo-woo nonsense. The latest is on alternative remedies for flu (via Respectful Insolence):
The good news is that there are many alternative medicines, herbs, and treatments that can be quite effective in the fight against a wide variety of viruses and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, to which mainstream [...]
A doctor, Dr Panayiotis Zavos, has claimed in a TV interview to have cloned nine embryos, in a secret lab somewhere in the Middle East.
It’s probably just an unfounded publicity stunt:
Professor Robert Winston, emeritus professor of fertility studies at Imperial College London, was blunter. “I do not know of any credible evidence that suggests Dr [...]
A medical ethics “expert”, Baroness Warnock, employed by Britain’s National Health Service, would like to see more senile people topping themselves:
“If you are demented you are wasting people’s lives, your family’s lives and you are wasting the resources of the NHS.
“I am fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable then someone [...]
Fairfax-owned “Essential Baby” has a typically lightweight piece on the topic of immunisation. The bottom line:
The way I look at vaccination is: there is a tiny risk of an adverse reaction, compared to a much, much bigger risk of my children contracting a host of diseases if I had chosen not to vaccinate them. I’m [...]
A Swiss assisted suicide clinic plans to help a healthy woman to die with her terminally ill husband, the Times Online reported today:
Dignitas founder plans assisted suicide of healthy woman .
The founder of the clinic, Ludwig Minelli, admitted that the clinic had helped people with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar to die. People [...]
According to a recent report, up to 40 percent of coma patients in a ‘vegetative state’ may be misdiagnosed.
“The biggest, most tragic clinical myth about brain injury today is that PVS can be reliably diagnosed by bedside observation alone. It has in fact been known for at least a decade, ever since a key [...]