One of the themes of Ben Goldacre’s new book, Bad Science, is the ‘medicalisation of everyday life’. (read and except here). Everyday experiences are turned into illnesses that need medical solutions. The pharmaceutical companies do it and so do the quacks. The quacks have a great ability though of also turning food and...
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Following on from my last post about whether the people that run quack web sites are deeply deluded or just plain old frauds, I had to share this gem with you. For all aficionados of quackery, this is truly a collectors item to be savoured. Thanks to whoever entered the healingbroom.com web site into...
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Or ‘How to be debunked by a nine year old schoolgirl’
In the special world of the quack, the crank and the pseudo-scientist the word ‘Energy’ holds the highest place in the league tables of misappropriated and abused language.
I often get complaints that the quackometer only spots quacks and lets cranks off the hook. That...
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“Once Dismissed as Hokum” is how Dr Danny Penman begins with a less-than-half-truth in his quacktasticly exceptional article about Spiritual Healing in the Daily Mail, “Could spiritual healing actually work?“
This article ought to serve as a case study in how to write about nonsense quackery for the madder end of the British Press. I...
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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...
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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...
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