Knowtex

It’s an elaborate placebo, and the relaxation and attention given patients is the only real “healing” going on.

I prefer to wait for sufficient details to become publicly established, that way if there is a cautionary tale to be learned, it will not be blunted by factual uncertainty.

I’m sad that today I’m adding a slide to one of my live presentations, adding Steve Jobs to the list of famous people who died treating terminal diseases with woo rather than with medicine.

Penn and Teller expliquent pourquoi le mouvement anti-vaccinations est Bullshit!

Jobs likes to make his own rules, whether the topic is computers, stock options, or even pancreatic cancer. The same traits that make him a great CEO drive him to put his company, and his investors, at risk.

Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they're right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry.

The titles vary across skeptics meetings, but at the core are the now-familiar topics: psychics, monsters, ghosts, UFOs, creationism, alternative and complementary medicine, popularization of science.

Newsnight investigates faith healers ThetaHealing, who claim to have miracle cures for cancer and HIV.

Edzard Ernst admits he is pleased to be retiring. His departure will be welcomed even more avidly by the numerous enemies he has made during his 18 years of subjecting complementary and alternative medicine (Cam) to scientific scrutiny.

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.