Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Self Help Against All Those I"ll Heal You Quacks

I love the link posted by David Bradley on his excellent science blog sciencebase. The site is called The Red Flags of Quackery and its a one stop checklist to guard yourself against fantastic claims about miracle cures and from self styled "experts" conjuring up explanations for the unexplained.

David Bradley gives some sound advice too:

If your putative sCAM practitioner mentions energy as being some kind of universally pervasive force, point out that energy is nothing more than the capacity to do work in the thermodynamic sense and ask them in what units they are measuring the mystical energy of which they speak. If they try to invoke ancient wisdom point out that demons, blood-letting and trepanning are ancient wisdom. If they hint at ancient eastern mysticism, remember the words of the mighty Tim Minchin: “There is no eastern and western medicine, there’s medicine and then there’s the stuff that hasn’t been proven to work.”

The bonus for going to his site is this incredibly funny video of comedian Dara O'Briain's put down of alternative medicine and homeopathy.

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