December 2009

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More Shoddy Reporting on Alternative Medicine from the CBC

December 17, 2009 in Health & Medicine by askeptic | No comments

Television being what it is, it can be rather difficult to research the stories presented. I don’t record the television news and at my age, my memory is a good deal less than perfect.

What I do remember from the Wednesday, December 16 edition of the CBC Television News at 6:00, is someone telling me that acupuncture cures migraine headaches. Not for everyone mind you, but definitely for some people. I remember there was no qualifiers to this. It wasn’t that someone was claiming acupuncture cures migraines. It was a definitive statement by the reporter – acupuncture cures migraines for some people.

It is pure nonsense of course, but I couldn’t help wonder what evidence the reporter had, to substantiate the claim.  I could be wrong in my assessment after all. Perhaps some new research had demonstrated a strong link between acupuncture and pain relief. It would have to be new research, because after twenty years of past research, acupuncture has failed to show positive pain relief much beyond a placebo. Read the rest of this entry »

ScienceDaily reports British Medical Journal editorial calls for a crackdown on alternative therapies

December 17, 2009 in Health & Medicine, Skeptic News by askeptic | No comments

The medical establishment and politicians must do more to crack down on alternative medicine, argues a senior scientist on the British Medical Journal website.  Thank goodness some medical associations are looking in the mirror and taking on the complimentary and alternative medicine crackpots. <read more ScienceDaily>

Astrologists Getting Wise? I Don’t Think So.

December 14, 2009 in General Science by askeptic | No comments

The headline in the Friday December 11 edition of the Calgary Herald caught my attention. It read: Astrologists get WISE to cosmos and was accompanied with a nice picture of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite.

I knew that WISE was soon to be launched but it came as a surprise that astrologists were taking such an interest. They’re not of course, claims of the Calgary Herald notwithstanding. Just how dumb do you have to be to print a headline like this? I wonder if anyone at the Calgary Herald even knows what’s wrong with it?

The story is a hacked up version of what is a very good piece of scientific journalism from a John Johnson Jr. of the Los Angeles Times. The story, as published in the Times, ran  about 1200 words and was entitled: The dark side of space about to be illuminated. As reprinted in the Herald, the piece ran less than a quarter of its original length and of course, there’s that headline.

For all my skeptical friends out there in Calgary (and beyond), read the original article in the Times just to get a feeling of what it is like to read a real newspaper. Oh yes, and rest assured that astrologists will not be working with data from WISE.