Acupuncture has been in the news recently. A former President of South Korea had to undergo major surgery to remove an acupuncture needle that had somehow lodged in his lung. A recent study in Pain compiled a list of 95 published reports of serious complications of acupuncture including 5 deaths.
A common error to make when interpreting clinical studies is to confuse non-specific effects – those that result from the therapeutic interaction or the process of observation – with a specific effect from the treatment being studied
The decline effect is the notion that psychics lose their powers under continued investigation. This idea is based on the observation that subjects who do significantly better than chance in early trials tend to do worse in later trials.
The sad thing is parents will be fooled into thinking that their children are protected from infectious diseases, when, in fact, they are not. Vaccines do not provide perfect protection. But a vaccine is superior to the nothing of homeopathy.
