Beware the Naturopathic Cancer Quack

Naturopathic medicine is not any kind of medicine, and its practitioners are nothing short of quacks. I know because I used to be one. Herein lies my story.   Six years ago, I was a quack. From 2011 until 2014, I was a licensed naturopathic doctor in the United States. Thanks to poor legislation in …

Critics of climate science claim that climate models lack predictive skill. In fact, some of the earliest predictions made thirty years ago have performed remarkably well.   Responsible bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provide overwhelming scientific evidence for a dominant anthropogenic influence on climate over at least the past fifty …

This is the second installment of a three-part series that shares the sidebars from the book Pseudoscience in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy (edited by Stephen Hupp, Cambridge University Press, 2019). Contributors for this installment include a former naturopathic doctor, a clinical psychologist, an anthropologist, a behavioral scientist, an obstetrician gynecologist, and an investigator and conference …

In 1947, the United States was dealing with reports of flying discs in its airspace. Were they a secret U.S. program or of foreign origin? General Nathan F. Twining signed a letter confirming the existence of the discs but admitted to not knowing their origin. Did the discs ever really exist?   On September 23, …

It began with a penetrating look at the long history of how a troubled America went haywire by Fantasyland author Kurt Andersen and ended with a romp through the nature of space and time—and the mind-bending speculation that we all might live in a holographic universe—from Columbia University cosmologist and author Brian Greene.   From …

“There is general scientific agreement that … mankind is influencing the global climate … through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels. … There are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered. … Man has a time window of five to ten years before … hard decisions regarding … energy strategies might …

More Brazilians believe in the importance of vaccines than in the validity of so-called alternative therapies, and almost 90 percent of the adult population accepts—at least in part—the fact that climate change is real and caused by human activity. Nevertheless, almost half of Brazilian adults reject one of the fundamental principles of the theory of …

Conversion stories—from people who held unsubstantiated beliefs but changed their minds—are a powerful tool for skeptics. It makes sense that a former believer in a pseudoscience who publicly renounces that belief can be more persuasive to many people than the rest of us who may have been harping about it for years. The unique power …

In December 2019 in a suburb of Philadelphia, science enjoyed a small but important victory over pseudoscience in autism treatment. James Gerl, an attorney and hearing officer in the Pennsylvania Office of Dispute Resolution, released his final decision in a dispute between the Lower Merion School District and the parents of a child in that …

As 2019 came to a close, news reports spread about nearly two dozen “mysterious” drones sighted in the night skies over rural Colorado and Nebraska. Despite the (presumed) drones apparently operating legally under Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations (and not, for example, at a high altitude or near an airport or government buildings) authorities launched …

Our special report “Hot Month, Hot Year, Hot Planet” in our November/December 2019 issue noted that while Northern Hemisphere residents would probably welcome the forthcoming winter, our friends in Australia might well be dreading their impending summer (2019–2020). That happened fast. A heat wave hit Australia in December 2019, echoing those of previous recent summers …

In a feature article in this issue, veteran climate scientist Tom M.L. Wigley evaluates the performance of climate models—two of them his own—asking how the models’ predictions made thirty years ago stand up today. They have performed remarkably well, he concludes; they’ve stood the test of time. Now a new study has been published evaluating …

Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one! —Anonymous On August 4, 1892, in the Massachusetts seaport and cotton-mill town of Fall River, a unique double axe murder occurred that shocked the citizenry at the time and continues to fascinate. …

Was the castle of King Arthur found? That’s what newspaper headlines stated some time ago in reference to excavations conducted on the archaeological site of Tintagel, north of Cornwall in England. The town has always been a destination for fans of the legendary figure of the sovereign, but the remains of the existing castle date …

There is an old joke about a patient who had high praise for her new doctor. She had headaches for years, and no one was ever able to explain why. The cause remained uncertain. But the uncertainty ended when her wonderful new doctor promptly diagnosed her with cephalalgia. The joke is that cephalalgia is not …

Recently a friend and colleague posted a LiveScience article on Facebook that suggested atheists are more intelligent than religious believers (Geggel 2017), and soon I was drawn into one of those sticky internet conversations that rarely work out well. The article was based on a 2013 meta-analysis of sixty-three studies of the relationship of religious …

I spend most of my time studying and writing about climate change politics. It is often a paralyzing experience; not only is climate change a grave threat, but it is also one of America’s most polarized political debates. I have come to appreciate that avoiding the easiest, most comfortable narrative—one that narrowly appeals to a …

Q: Have you ever investigated a haunting you could not explain or you thought was real? Have you ever seen a ghost? —D. Sheehan A: As a longtime investigator into ghostly phenomena (that is, phenomena attributed to ghosts not necessarily caused by ghosts), I’ve been asked some version of this question countless times. It’s a …

Nine Evidence-Based Guidelines I read with interest Gary Bakker’s article promoting evidence-based guidelines for a “good life” (November/December 2019). Yet I was left pondering the nature of the evidence proposed to support the nine suggestions. In his introduction, Dr. Bakker promotes the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). A key feature of RCTs is, of …

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. By Caroline Criado Perez. New York: Abrams Press. 411 pp. Hardcover, $27.00   Unlike many popular books on gender differences and conflicts, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men refreshingly ignores brains, personalities, and stereotypes. Instead, Caroline Criado Perez shows why sexism …

The Warfare between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die. Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley, editors. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. ISBN 9781421426181. 368 pp. Softcover, $39.95.   In the introduction to The Warfare between Science and Religion, its thesis is clearly laid out: “There has never been a systemic …

The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience. By Lee McIntyre. MIT Press, 2019. ISBN 9780266039833. 296 pp., $27.95.   Science is under attack. The evidence for global warming is overwhelming, but many reject the evidence in favor of ideology and just believe what they want to believe. Vaccine-preventable diseases are rebounding due to rejection …