Don’t Crack My Back, Jack.
Chiropractic is one of a growing number of treatments that falls under alternative medicine. You can find a chiropractic clinic in pretty much
any city in the developed world. Perhaps the best measuring stick to a cultural phenomenon's popularity is if it has been lampooned in the Simpsons. Chiropractic has!
Chiropractic is certainly not cheap and you are encouraged to visit multiple times a week, driving the cost up higher and higher. Frankly, anyone paying for such a treatment should be certain that it is helping them to get better.
Chiropractors like to present themselves as proper doctors. The first consultation you have with a chiropractor will involve general health questions and some will do a spinal x-ray. This will be shown to you at your second consultation, waved in front of you with an explanation that there is damage to your vertebrae and that immediate action needs to be taken to help prevent further degradation. It's a pretty slick sales routine in...
Woman Dies After an Intravenous Drip of Turmeric, Alternative Medicine, What’s the Harm?
"What's the harm?" If alternative medicine has no effect, why not give it a go?
Alternative medicine can kill you. That's what the harm is. It is being reported that a woman in her thirties has died as a direct result of receiving an intravenous infusion of turmeric solution. This solution was injected directly into her veins by someone with no medical training, someone who should not be able to practice medicine. That someone is a naturopath.
As with almost all forms of alternative medicine, many claims are made about the uses of turmeric. In the case of turmeric, these often revolve around the reduction of inflammation of joints all the way through to a treatment for chronic conditions such as Crohn's disease, but it doesn't end there. Some will also claim that it helps with leprosy! Turmeric is not only used as a treatment for a multitude of diseases but also as a supplement to help prevent different conditions. Of course, it is...
Why Homeopathy Is Nonsense.
Let me ask you a simple question. If I had some orange juice and I added more water to it. What would happen to the flavor? Of course, there is only one possible answer. The flavor would get weaker. That's what adding water does. Water is a solvent after all.
I don't think you would find a single person anywhere on Earth who would argue with this statement. But yet there are many people out there who will happily trust a homeopath and who will take homeopathic "medicine".
Homeopathy is perhaps the poster child for pseudoscience.
The basis of homeopathy is that if a person who is healthy takes a drug. The symptoms of the illness that the drug cures will be produced in that person. While a person who has an illness will be cured by that drug.
As these drugs cause undesired reactions they should be diluted down to safe levels. So that no adverse reaction is observed in the patient. This...
Have we just taken a huge step towards discovering life elsewhere in the universe?
The planet Earth is currently the only place in the entire universe that we know of which can support life. Earth is orbiting a rather unremarkable star in a rather unremarkable part of the Milky Way galaxy. The fact of the matter is that our sun is just one of about one hundred thousand million stars in the Milky Way alone. And the Milky Way, well it's just one of at least one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Or to put it another way, there are more stars in our universe than there are grains of sand on Earth. But yet, as of now, Earth is the only place in the universe that we know there is life.
But why is there life on Earth? Very simply, the conditions on Earth are good for life. We live in what is known as the "Goldilocks" zone. This means that we get just the right amount of energy from the sun, and...
A Response to Robert De Niro and Robert F. Kennedy’s $100,000 Vaccine Safety Challenge
If you are reading this and are unsure about the safety of vaccines, the first thing I need to tell you is that absolutely, unequivocally, without the slightest shadow of a doubt - vaccines are safe.
So the question is why exactly are the likes of Robert De Niro and Robert F. Kennedy issuing a challenge about vaccine safety? Are they genuinely concerned with the safety of vaccines? I suppose it is possible that they are, but the reality is that there is absolutely no reason to be worried. Vaccines have been shown for a long time to be safe.
Well as safe as any medicine can be anyway. There are always some risks involved when taking medicines. It's why every medicine you ever take has a warning label. Because there is a risk - a risk that is considered to be acceptable. The reason we know that there is a risk is because there is a rigorous system of regulation in...
How to Weed Out Fake News Like a Scientist
At the end of every year, the major dictionaries like to publish their words of the year. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary went with Post Truth, an apt term if ever there was one. Well, a mere two months into 2017, and it is already looking like there are two hot contenders for their words of the year. I predict it's either going to be "Fake News" or the wonderfully weaselly words, "Alternative Facts". Not that either of these two things are new phenomena. No, we have just called them what they are in the past: lies, nonsense and - well - plenty more colourful terms mainly linked to bovine excrement.
Alternative facts and fake news are worrying, because they are used to sway public opinion about a whole myriad of topics but especially about science. You merely need to take a quick look at your Facebook or Twitter feed and there it is, fake news. If it was easy to...
Science Is Under Attack!
Science. I love it, and if I had to guess, I would say you do, too. After all - that is why you are here, isn't it? Just stop and think for a minute about all the ways that science affects your life and is a force for good. I bet if I asked you to list them all, you could come up with quite a few. Or maybe not. Maybe you take science for granted. It's part of modern life, and it's certainly very easy to just accept that science happens. And that's fine.
The problem is that there is an ever growing number of people out there who don't think science is a force for good. They don't see how science has improved our lives. Worse still - they just refuse to trust scientists. You're not one of those people. Are you?
Because if I was to ask them what they thought of science, they wouldn't be listing the innumerable positives. No,...