I once overheard a conversation between a couple of friends about how to know what medications to take. They were musing about how in an ideal world there would be a council of elders who would be the custodians of that sort of knowledge and if you were sick you'd go to them and they'd tell you. The assumption seemed to be that there was some innate wisdom required and somehow this council would know what to do - better than trained...
Dr. Tenpenny on Vaccines is back on Facebook. If you don't partake in Facebook I suppose you won't be able to see what she's up to, but she has websites as well. Feel free to look her up on the innerwebs. Tenpenny Integrated Medical Centers, the page for her business where she offers up all manner of unscientific therapies, has also returned. They are both up and running, though feeling just a bit more sedate than usual. At the same time...
Image from http://www.cover4face.com/ Not long ago, say about 6 weeks, there was a Facebook page called Proud Parents of Unvaccinated Children (PPUC). Its purpose was to celebrate having children who were unvaccinated so as to trade suggestions and advice about how to keep kids unvaccinated. That advice ranged from merely misinformed to utterly bizarre. It was a hotbed of conspiracy theory, new age, libertarian, pseudo-science, outright lies...
I was at a workshop this last weekend. One of the attendees had a cold and announced that anyone who believed in contagion might want to avoid hugging her. And I thought, what???? Is that a joke? Can she be serious? Who could not "believe in contagion"? It's not like it's a concept that originated in the last couple of centuries with the advent of science. It's been around a long time. Doubting that diseases are communicable would...
I've been working on two causes at causes.com. The first one was The Anti-Anti-Vaccine Campaign. The intention was and is to encourage people to challenge anti-vaccine propaganda that shows up on their Facebook newsfeed. It's still alive but I haven't worked out how to promote it very effectively. The people at causes.com said it was too negative and appealed to too small a segment of the population for them to add it to their featured...
Natural News isn't the only website that attacks science and reason on a regular basis. They are legion. I could provide long lists, but I won't. The site that appears most often as "evidence" for questionable health claims is mercola.com. Dr. Joseph Mercola is not as vile as Mike Adams of Natural News, but he's very much an anti-science, anti-health and pro making-things-up-for-money kind of guy. When I see anyone using his website to back...
One of the advantages of having a blog is that I don't have to submit to a debate. There might be one in the comments when I'm done, but the post is mine and mine alone, so I can just tell it like I see it. So, what is true? The person who made the comment states that for her Acupuncture and Bowen therapy are true. What I assume she means is that she's had positive experiences with both, they both appeared to help with the problems she took...