Tag Archives: alternative medicine

How well do you understand placebo effects?

“Placebo effect” is a term that almost everyone knows but few seem to understand. Misconceptions about placebo effects are rampant and usually center around the idea that a placebo effect occurs when you feel better because you thought a treatment … Continue reading

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Naturopaths use deceptive tactics to support pseudoscience

Earlier this year, a new review paper was published claiming to show evidence that naturopathy was effective (Myers et al. 2019). I’m a bit late to the game on this one, but I still want to briefly talk about this … Continue reading

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Acupuncture is just a placebo

Acupuncture is an extremely popular form of complementary alternative medicine (CAM) that has even worked its way into many “integrative” hospitals. It is also fiercely defended by its believers. Unfortunately, it is not well defended by actual evidence, so I … Continue reading

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Is it likely that alternative medicine works? The importance of prior probability

Prior probability is basically just the plausibility of a result, given everything else we know about the universe. In other words, when evaluating a hypothesis or a study, you should weigh your confidence in the result not only on the … Continue reading

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Replacing science-based cancer treatments with “alternative treatments” increases your risk of dying from cancer (new study)

Cancer is a truly terrible disease, and although our ability to treat and even cure many types of cancer has greatly improved, our current methods for dealing with it are admittedly imperfect and often have serious side-effects. It is, therefore, … Continue reading

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