Another excellent piece about HIV/AIDS denial.

On Science-Based Medicine, we strive to apply the light of science and reason on all manner of unscientific belief systems about medicine. For the most part, but by no means exclusively, we have concentrated on so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) because there is an active movement to infiltrate faith-based, rather than science-based, modalities into “conventional” medicine. Indeed, such efforts are well-financed, both by public and private organizations, and are alarmingly successful at insinuating postmodernist and pseudoscientific beliefs into academia to form an unholy new monster that has been termed by some as “quackademic medicine.”

So science is under heavy suspicion while CAM is given the revolutionary salute. Yee-ha.

However, one pseudoscientific belief

It’s good to question conventional wisdom, except when it isn’t. Conventional wisdom holds that a bridge designed by engineers and built by reputable builders is safer to drive across than one designed by shamans and built by hairdressers. Questioning that conventional wisdom is not really all that productive, and if anyone listens to the questioning, it’s downright lethal.

So with Christine Maggiore.

Until the end, Christine Maggiore remained defiant.On national television and in a blistering book, she denounced research showing that HIV causes AIDS. She refused to take medications to treat her own virus. She gave birth to two children and breast fed them, denying any risk to their health. And when her 3-year-old child, Eliza Jane, died of

Norm points out, as Ian MacDougall did in comments, that I said too much when I said I didn’t think we need empirical evidence to warrant thinking that telling children that people suffer torment in hell forever is harmful and bad. He points out that extrapolating from experience is itself a form of evidence – ‘The experience we have contains various forms of evidence.’ Well yes, and if that is included in what is meant by empirical evidence, then I do think we need it, but I was making the (usual? common?) distinction between subjective evidence about first person experience and intersubjective evidence about the world outside first person experience.

Part of my point was that for empirical questions … Read the rest

The ‘detox’ question is pretty amusing.

In the majority of cases, producers and retailers contacted by the young scientists were forced to admit that they are renaming mundane things, like cleaning or brushing, as ‘detox’. They range in price from £1-2 for a detox drink to £36.95 for detox bath accessories.

Hahahaha – are there detox rubber duckies? Detox loofahs? Detox washcloths? All priced at ten times the normal rate because of their magical detox powers which the producers and retailers have admitted they don’t actually have?

The dossier shows that, while companies and individuals now use the claim ‘detox’ to promote everything from foot patches to hair straighteners, they are unable to provide reliable evidence or consistent explanations of