Edzard Ernst is a leading campaigner against alternative medicine. He is also highly intelligent and hardworking, so is a person of interest to me. As a high profile, dare I say vituperative, critic of complementary therapies, it helps to know what sort of man he is. I won’t say “Know thine enemy”, because I believe…
It will come as no surprise to many osteopaths out there that there might be a link between head trauma, even in the distant past, and a patient’s current psychological state. It seems self-evident to those of us who have palpated many heads in our lives and heard the many histories that accompany them. However…
I’ve been hearing the phrase “magical thinking” for a few years now, ever since I began to take an interest in what skeptics were saying about alternative medicine. It’s generally a derogatory term, the ‘magical’ bit seeming to be the antithesis of sensible science, which uses “critical” thinking.(1) And then just recently, I…
I am highly intellectually attracted to skeptics and their writing. Their books are intelligent and entertaining, and they write about subject matters which I find fascinating. If I drew a Venn diagram with skeptics on the one side and alternative therapists on the other, I would be in that segment in the middle. I used…
Edited and updated June 2016. This has been one of the most popular blogs on osteofm.com. The most significant change is to the paragraph titled “Osteopathy needs different sort of research to standard scientific research”. I have altered this in the light of the work being done by CauseHealth. It’s been many months since I…
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