Dubious Claims in Youth Psychotherapy

Part I: Neurodevelopmental Issues Psychotherapy for young people is full of questionable ideas. This article, the first in a three-part series, addresses neurodevelopmental issues, including craniosacral therapy for intellectual disabilities, dolphin-assisted therapy for those on the autism spectrum, brain balancing for inattention, teaching based on learning styles, and dental devices for tics. There are hundreds …

Greta Thunberg’s clarion call at the United Nations offers hope that emerging generations will use science and reason to address our planet’s urgent problems. Baby boomers, who ushered in the proverbial “Age of Aquarius” in the sixties, have held leading positions in government, business, and other spheres of activity for the past four decades or …

Electrohypersensitivity syndrome may have little to do with actual exposure to electromagnetic radiation. It instead may be better understood as a phobia explained by anxiety disorder mechanisms. Development of communication technologies (such as mobile phones and other wireless devices) has been followed in the past twenty years with appearance of a new self-assessed, so-called electrohypersensitivity …

“Now if there is one thing about dreams that everyone should know by now, it’s that they can seem very real.”  —John W. Loftus   “Untutored tribes have many good intellectual reasons as to why living people have souls which can leave the body and which possess supernatural powers. First of all is sleep, and …

To reconcile inconvenient scientific findings, the creationists’ god had to make sedimentary rock layers nice and smooth and had to tamper with atoms to nullify the results of radiocarbon dating.   This is the third of an occasional series of articles on the Creationist Funhouse. In the first episode of this series (May/June 2019), I …

Creationists and other religious fundamentalists commonly (and erroneously) bring up the issue of abiogenesis as an argument against evolution, claiming that life is too complex to have arisen naturally from simple (nonliving) chemicals. Abiogenesis is the development of chemical life from nonliving chemicals. It is an active area of research for scientists studying “origin of …

Dr. H. Gilbert Welch is an American physician and cancer screening researcher. As a former professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, he has published many peer-reviewed papers about the harms of early detection and specifically of cancer screening—the systematic search for cancer before it causes symptoms. Welch is also a …

President Trump barely attended a U.N. climate summit. Tom Brady and the New England Patriots look ready to win another Super Bowl. It’s a good time to talk about the quarterback’s pajamas. Yep, Brady sells pajamas. Well, no, sorry. Brady sells “Athlete Recovery Sleepwear” (ARS). Brady’s ARS is advertised with the slogan, “When we wake …

Perhaps it’s the season. Perhaps it’s the start of a new year, a new decade. Whatever the reason, I find myself full of gratitude.             It sometimes may seem as if everyone has gone bonkers and that fake news, factless assertions, disinformation, and misinformation have taken over our public discourse. …

  Leading lights in the worlds of science, skepticism, and the arts celebrated the grand opening of the Center for Inquiry (CFI) West and the inauguration of its new theater, named for Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, in a standing-room-only event the evening of October 21, 2019. The theater at CFI West’s new building in …

The Federation of European Academies of Medicine (FEAM) and the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council issued a joint statement on November 7, 2019, urging the World Health Organization (WHO) to clarify how traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and other so-called alternative medicines (SCAMs) should be used. The WHO has included TCM diagnoses in the International Classification of Diseases …

Readers will recall that the lead article in our recent “Health Wars” special issue (September/October 2019) critiqued a series of six newsstand books or “book-azines” on natural healing remedies published by National Geographic. Our cover article, by California physician Victor Benson, found they were full of claims “that lack scientific evidence, are inconsistent and internally …

Cosmos: Possible Worlds will debut on National Geographic channels March 9, 2020, and on Fox channels in Summer 2020, it was announced in November. Skeptical Inquirer readers may remember we were allowed to visit the set for part of the filming at Santa Fe Studios in 2018 (September/October 2018). This is the long-awaited sequel to …

Philosopher of science Mario Bunge has been honored with the publication of Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift, an 827-page volume with forty-one chapters by scholars from sixteen countries written to honor him on his 100th birthday (September 14, 2019). Bunge is a longtime fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and has written several key …

Carl Zimmer, who spoke at CSICon 2018 and subsequently published a well-received article “Seven Big Misconceptions about Heredity” in the May/June 2019 Skeptical Inquirer, has won the 2019 Science in Society Journalism Award in the book category from the National Association of Science Writers (NASW).  The award is for his book She Has Her Mother’s …

The Independent Investigation Group (IIG) has had a standing offer of $100,000 to anyone who can demonstrate they have a paranormal power under controlled conditions.1 In October 2018, Mirko Janchevski, a man of about sixty from Kumanovo, Macedonia, applied for our challenge. He claimed to be able to tell if someone is alive or dead …

The proportion of Americans saying they have no religious affiliation is rising significantly, while the proportion identifying as Christian is sharply dropping, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center released October 17, 2019. Pew said that the percentage of American adults surveyed who describe their religious identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing …

A poltergeist is said to be a sort of prankster entity, after the German word for a “noisy” (poltern) “spirit” (geist). Poltergeist phenomena include mysteriously thrown objects, strange noises, or unusual fires (Nickell 1995, 79). Those who promote belief in poltergeists often attribute the effects—fiery or otherwise—to the repressed hostilities of a child or other …

Could there be any more extreme beliefs than those held by people who are convinced that the earth is flat or that we live in a computer-generated matrix? Some people are convinced that it is possible to live without eating or drinking—literally claiming to be “existing on air.” These “breatharians” claim to be feeding on …

It sounds like the script of a science fiction/fantasy movie: The class dunce takes a pill and suddenly becomes smarter than everyone in the class, including the teacher. An elderly Alzheimer’s patient takes a pill and his memory is instantly restored—Alzheimer’s dementia cured! Don’t you wish? If only that sort of story could be true! …

Brazil is considered a developing country with substantial levels of poverty, yet São Paulo, the largest city in South America, is a sophisticated modern metropolis and home to the largest university on the continent. Because citizens are guaranteed healthcare as a constitutional right, Brazil operates the largest national healthcare system in the world, and Brazilian …

This column is adapted from a speech delivered at the 2019 American Climate Leadership Summit held in Washington, D.C., May 1–2, 2019.   Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma may be best known today for its picturesque lakes and trails, but for three weeks in 1954 the park was also the setting for one of …

Q: It’s said that the best way to keep people down is to limit their access to education and knowledge, making it easier to control them. That seems to be what the government does. What do you think? —C. Griffin A: I was asked this question in mid-2019, accompanied by the news headline “Trump Administration …

The Health Wars First, let me say the happiest day every two months is when my new issue of Skeptical Inquirer arrives, and the saddest day is the day I finish reading it (which sometimes occurs the same day). I admit when I first saw the subject of your “Health Wars” issue (September/October 2019), I …

A Deal with the Devil. By Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken. Atria Books, 2018. ISBN 9-781501-163845-53600. 290 pp. Hardcover, $26. Most people, when they think of psychic scams, think of the street-corner psychic who takes the casual passerby for a few hundred dollars and who may occasionally score big and take a repeat “customer” for …

What Does It Feel Like to Die? Inspiring New Insights from the Experience of Dying. Jennie Dear. Citadel Press/Kensington Publishing. 2019. ISBN 978-0-8065-3986-7. 206 pp. Softcover, $14.99.   We’re all going to die. What does dying feel like? We can’t really know, because no one has come back after death to tell us. For those …