As you know, the quackometer works by counting words, or combinations of words, that strongly suggest the web site is full of quackery. I thought I would write about a few of those words and why they are dead give-aways. So, ‘Holistic’ – not in itself necessarily anything to do with medicine, but this word is often used with medicine when quackery is at work. Why is this and what [read more…]
You can now subscribe to RSS Feeds to get all the Quackiest Stories direct to your browser without scanning the news sites and papers yourself. The News Alert Engine is still being thoroughly tested and handheld. Expect a few technical glitches and bad matches for a few days yet. The biggest problems have been keeping down the false positives, that is, stopping stories being flagged as quacky when they are [read more…]
The latest quackometer functionality is now being tested on the quackometer web site. Throughout the day, the little black duck will be reading the news for you and creating alerts if quackery is found. Hoards of quackbusters around the world will be alerted to potential quackery in the newsapers before it starts hitting peoples’ doormats. Together we can expose the worst offending news sources. Daily lists of quack stories will [read more…]
I thought my post on Reiki Healing for Hedgehogs was going to be a one-off. But a recent trip to the garden centre has opened up a whole new compost heap of prickles. Now, I live in hedgehog country. I have a hedgehog hospital within feather spitting distance of my pond, and I see them around me all the time. I am fond of them. My prickly, vespertine friends come [read more…]
Well, I’ve had a bit of time to put some effort into the Quackometer, and now it has a few new features and improvements. 1. First – ‘Am I a Quack or Not?’ will allow you to type in a name and see how Quacky that person is. More on this later… 2. Secondly, we have some tables ranking web sites and suspect quacks to give some highlights for the [read more…]
I have written before about my assertion that if you find someone saying that you cannot get all the nutrients you need through food, then you have also found someone selling food supplements. This is the basic scam behind so many nutritionists – they make the process of eating a healthy diet look so formidable and fraught that you had better hedge your bets and scoff a lot of pills [read more…]
I promise I will write about something else other than nonsense in the Daily Mail, but today’s story requires a comment or two. Their headline story on the on-line edition proclaims: Early cannabis abuse ‘does lead to heroin addiction’. Now a headline like that is crying out for some investigation. Taking cannabis as a teenager really does pave the way to heroin addiction in later life, say scientists.Researchers have found [read more…]
In today’s Daily Mail, Brendan Montague brings us the sensational story that Migraine suffers need not suffer much longer thanks to a wonder device about to be launched in the US and available for a paltry £1,000 (with a further £15 for each treatment). Millions of migraine sufferers have been given hope of a cure with the invention of a magnetic pain “zapper”… The handheld device is placed at the [read more…]
As you can see, I have signed up this blog to the Bloggers Against Torture campaign as part of the torture awareness month. I will keep this short. To compare the act of torture to the banalities of quackery will do the victims a dishonour. However, I would venture that both the justification of torture and various quackeries are based on the same misguided logic: What we wish to be [read more…]
Quackery is often accompanied with grand associations with complex science, the harder the better. Usually, quantum theory is the science of choice: it has plenty of counter-intuitive results, is riddled with deep mysteries, and most importantly, you (the quack’s target) are very unlike to understand it. The recipe is simple. My quack theory is mysterious; quantum theory is mysterious, therefore quantum theory helps back up my own theory. In addition, [read more…]
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