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…
Serendipitously, just after I had joined Twitter and was considering writing about osteopathy, a tweet appeared that Edzard Ernst would be giving a talk in Eastbourne to a local sceptics’ society. Now Ernst was the first ever Professor of Complementary Medicine, at Exeter University. He is pretty down on osteopathy, and I remember the day…
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…
I can’t remember why I raced to book a ticket to the CauseHealth Conference in Nottingham in May. It might have been because it only cost £35 (lunch included!), it might have been because lots of keen-minded people I follow on twitter were excited about it (sports physio Adam Meakins, Neil Maltby, Chews Health…),…
Time and time again I read something about “cranial osteopathy”, which seems to describe something which is nothing like what I do. It is often assumed that we sit there “head-holding”. I saw a description this week that we claim to”magnetize the blood”. I’m not surprised that there is such confusion, even amongst osteopaths. I…
Ben Goldacre is a physicist and science writer. Along with Richard Dawkins and Simon Singh, he is a high profile advocate of rigorous scientific method, and is furiously exasperated at the dumbing down of science. This book is his attempt to educate the reader to look critically at science. He begins by conducting some…
I didn’t do A levels. I was lucky enough to go to a school where we were given the option to do the more colourful and varied International Baccalaureate Diploma. Part of this delightful programme was a course in “Theory of Knowledge”. I still don’t know what that means, but in practice it consisted of…
As someone who couldn’t even work Facebook nine months ago, it came as something of a shock to find I was involved in a Twitter spat with Simon Singh, one of osteopathy’s fiercest critics. What next? A public fracas with Richard Dawkins? However several emails and a long phone call later, feathers were unruffled, a…
One of my patients used to run a health food shop which sold various herbal, homeopathic and assorted alternative remedies. One of the most annoying questions people asked her was “Does it work?” She likened it to a pharmacist being asked if paracetamol works. ‘Well, it does work for some people and some conditions, but it…
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