Posts Tagged ‘ Pseudoscience ’

Michael Phelps is a walking advertisement for pseudoscience

Aug 10th, 2016 4:26 pm | By

So the magic potion for this Olympics as everyone knows by now is “cupping.” Steven Novella takes on the challenge.

Four years ago, while watching the 2012 Olympic Games, I noticed a lot of athletes wearing colored strips in various patterns on their body. I discovered that these strips were called kinesiotape, and they were used to enhance performance, reduce injury, and help muscles recover more quickly. I also discovered that these claims for kinesiotape were complete nonsense.

I missed that one. So much bullshit, so little time.

Athletes look for any kind of edge, Novella says, so that makes them suckers for pseudoscience, and useful to people who are selling pseudoscience.

The industry targets professional or elite

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No teaching pseudoscience please

May 13th, 2012 12:02 pm | By

A letter to the Observer notes that worries about creationism prompted the government to change the rules for free schools to prevent them from teaching pseudoscience.

However, not enough attention has been paid to two equally grave threats to science education, namely Maharishi and Steiner schools. Maharishi schools follow the educational methods of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru of the transcendental meditation movement, while Steiner education is based on an esoteric/occultist movement called anthroposophy, founded by Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner (“Holistic unit will ‘tarnish’ Aberdeen University reputation“). The Maharishi school has as its specialist subject the “science of creative intelligence”, which is not based on science. It also teaches a system of herbal medicine, most of which

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

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This novel paradigm

Dec 20th, 2010 10:29 am | By

John C McLachlan, professor of medical education at Durham, points out that it’s a common ploy to make nasty things more attractive by dressing them up with new names, like for instance changing the name of “complementary and alternative medicine” to “integrative medicine.” (That seems like a tricky one – you gain the flattering implications of “integrative” but you lose the at least as flattering implications of “alternative.” Decisions decisions.)

When there is tricksy wordplay going on, it may be time for another Sokal hoax. McLachlan sent a proposal to an International Conference on Integrative Medicine to be held in Jerusalem last October. It included this exciting observation:

Recently, as a result of my developmental studies on human embryos, I

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