University of Toronto upholds "alternative medicine" course that denied vaccines, taught "quantum medicine"

Given the proliferation of in silico methods, physics will eat biology alive.

The University of Essex in the UK had a very effective Professor of Complementary Medicine, who did proper trials and convincingly demonstrated what alternative therapies work and what doesn’t (Hint: Not a lot) and got the papers published in decent peer reviewed journals.

Unfortunately some right Charlie got him fired. :disappointed: :angry:

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As far as homeopathy;CTM;healing touch;ect.ect. I agree with H.L.Mencken when he commented on Chiropractic and patent medicines.They are just means or removing undesirable elements from the gene pool.

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Certainly, if it were presented as anthropology of idiot newagers, that would be totally reasonable. That doesn’t seem to be the case, though.

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Because the idea behind a university, and academia in general, is, at least in theory, to maintain some standards of rigor. These woo merchants are perfectly free to peddle their crap on poorly-designed, scammy websites just like the rest of their compatriots.

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What could possibly be more metal than making a new horseman of the apocalypse? Sounds like biologists need to up their game.

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The issue of bioweapons was tactfully neglected in the strip, should’ve been raised in the last frame instead of a rather lame attempt on a point.

That, and all the imaging stuff the squishies use, from optical to electron to fluorescence to the fancy new near-field, is from physicists anyway. And then there are all those kinds of spectrometers from mass to Raman…

At the end, everything rides on the math-physics tandem.

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They WERE working on it 'till Nixon stopped 'em. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention
Although seriously, bio-weapons make terrible military weapons but good terrorist ones…THAT’S why we gave up on 'em.

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http://abstrusegoose.com/156

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I love this one! :smiley:

I also saw somewhere a picture of janitors hauling a target plate with a cat embedded into it, apparently in high velocity, complaining that since the biologists were let to use the accelerator they have much more work. (It was in some article about accelerating superheavy molecules of peptide/protein/DNA class. But I cannot find it now.)

I was once assigned to teach HS Forensic Science, a topic I had no knowledge of or interest in. I started the summer researching so I knew something about the subject, which I has assumed was legitimate. It mostly isn’t. I ended up teaching the class as a kind of meta analysis focusing on why most of it wasn’t science at all. I am now a criminal defendant’s dream juror.

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That’s because bioweapons aren’t a new horseman of the apocalypse. We’ve been living with plagues of bio-warfare, genocidal scale for at least since the dawn of agriculture.

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I’m going to go out on a limb and guess the lecturer does not like GMOs either.

I notice that every time someone links to an anti-GMO site it is almost invariably an anti-vaxxer site. And that any article on GMOs draws people posting links and links and links to anti-vaxxer sites. As near as I can tell, a lot of the online interest in this hoodoo seems to be a very well organized spam operation.

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Traditional chiropractic is straight-up quackery.

There is evidence that chiropractic treatment works (albeit with substantial risks that are not present in equally effective treatments such as physiotherapy and therapeutic massage) for the temporary symptomatic relief of back pain. Nothing else.

But the chiropractic tradition does not limit itself to temporary relief of back pain; instead, it claims to be able to cure everything from malaria to asthma. In those cases, chiropractic treatment is lethally ineffective.

See http://www.badscience.net/2009/07/we-are-more-possible-than-you-can-powerfully-imagine/ and http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/oct/17/bad-science-chiropractors and What's the harm in going to a chiropractor? for starters.

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Pretending that you were serious:

  1. It devalues the degree of everyone else who attends that university, and

  2. It kills people.

Quackery is not a victimless crime.

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I couldn’t lift my head, use my left arm, or sit for more than a few minutes. Now I can. That’s not just pain relief, which ironically is all GPs would offer me. My skeleton is back in place. My shoulders are straight now; my range of motion is back to normal. And I’ve been pain-free for over two years.

If that’s quackery, I’ll goddamn take it. It’s better than weeks off work with no sleep, begging to get on a physiotherapy waiting list.

Conventional medicine believed until the 80s a woman’s uterus would tear apart if she ran a marathon. PMS wasn’t declared real by the medical establishment until the second half of the 80s, despite it being something nearly all adult women experience to a greater or lesser degree. Idiocy and bad science are everywhere.

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But they are job creators…

via: possum collider
Edit: current source of Dr. Kim’s comics Science and Ink - Science & General Cartoons

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If they follow the scientific method to draw their conclusions, why wouldn’t they be?

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It will also cure stinky feet and get the crabgrass out of your lawn!

My mothers friend was left crippled in a wheelchair by a chiro. There are some very knowledgeable chiros and some that are complete lunatics. Of course, there are also lunatic MDs and we owe the Tea Party for getting them out of the closet.

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I’m glad that you’re better, but it wasn’t the chiro that did it. Time did; the chiro just kept you busy while your body healed itself.

Yes, just like any other profession, physicians sometimes hold beliefs that are not backed by evidence (exemplified by your examples from the history of medical misogyny). Chiropracty is not one of those cases; the evidence is in, and it doesn’t work.