Anyone who’s spent a significant amount of time addressing the scientific problems that come up with alternative medicine will eventually be accused by some quack of being on the Big Pharma payroll. If the alties were right, pharmaceutical companies throw away millions of dollars on misinformation campaigns, focusing largely on Facebook, Twitter, and other internet forums. Advocates of science-based medicine get cut a check once a months for their services.
Law enforcement is investigating a Scientology Narconon center in eastern Oklahoma after four people died while undergoing a Dianetics-based ‘treatment’ for drug addiction there.
It’s been a bad week for homeopathy, which translates to a good week for science-based medical policies.
World Homeopathy Awareness Week started this past Tuesday, probably because Tuesday is an infinitely diluted Monday. It’s kind of like Breast Cancer Awareness Week in that the thing we’re supposed to be more aware of suffers a major PR blow from all that awareness. But they’re different in that homeopaths are perversely proud of their special week while cancerous cells tend to not promote theirs.
Rachael Dunlop is an ALS and ageing researcher and Vice President of the New South Wales committee of the Australian Skeptics. She also won the most hilarious internet award ever. She blogs at Skeptic’s Book. We talk about science communication, homeopathy, the anti-vaccination craze and some of the other pseudoscience she and her fellow skeptics deal with in Australia.
Animal testing is a tough subject. For the most part I’m for it, although there are probably a lot of unnecessary ways it goes down which should probably be stopped. But when it comes to developing new drugs to treat diseases, there’s a certain amount of acceptable harm to non-human animals which in my opinion can be justified in the interests of a greater good to humanity.
Probably some readers disagree with me there, and we can have a discussion about the moral ambiguities and grey areas, and maybe learning more about it might cause some of us to change our minds. But when you get into how animals are used in the alternative medicine industry, all these potential nuances are wiped away since by definition alternative medicine doesn’t even work. If any of the practices I’m about to get into had shown efficacy through real scientific evidence, then they wouldn’t be alternative medicine anymore; they’d just be medicine. So what we’re talking about here isn’t about whether we should sacrifice X number of Y species to save Z number of humans; it’s just about how much we should let the quack industry harm animals for the sole purpose of profit.
So I went to see Contagion last weekend. The first thing I did afterwards was lash out at and threaten our followers on Twitter for no good reason. The second thing I did was check out what the alternative medicine crowd thought of it. I thought it’d be fun to see how angry they were over certain aspects, but what I found was even more disturbing than what I expected. [Spoilers ahead!]
Sharron Angle is one of the funnier Republican challenger candidates. The other week she won her party’s primary for US Senate from Nevada, and now she’s set to run against Harry Reid in November. Lots of crazy shit she’s said and advocated has been reported on, and everyone is having a fun time with her kookiness. Many of these positions can be found on her own website, and I’ll cite additional sources too.
Atheist Hobos 