Archive > Volume 47
May/June 2023
Volume 47, No. 3
Medical Pseudoscience around the World
Homeopathy Research Hits New Low Norbert Aust and Viktor Weisshäupl
“Homeopathy in Cancer Patients: Almost Too Good to Be True.” That was the headline of an article in the October 23, 2022, issue of the Austrian weekly news magazine Profil reporting on an investigation by the Austrian Agency for Scientific Integrity (OeAWI) (Schönberger 2022). The subject of the investigation was a study on the use …
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Medical Pseudoscience around the World
Rise of Ayurveda: A Dangerous Trend to Decolonize the Scientific Method Samit Ghosal
Progress made in India in the past decade in digitization, banking reforms, and economic structuring has been phenomenal. However, there seems to be an inversely proportional relationship between economic/technological advancement and health/education in the present-day political India. It seems that the concept of going back to one’s roots has been exclusively reserved for health and …
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Medical Pseudoscience around the World
The Hypocrisy of Medical Disinformation: A Report from Hungary Nóra Falyuna and Péter Krekó
Looking at the business behind pseudoscientific disinformation, we see that disseminators of online medical disinformation are hypocritical anti-capitalists. Despite regularly attacking the “pharmaceutical mafia” and Big Pharma, they obtain tremendous profits both directly (through website advertisem*nts and clicks) and indirectly (through promotion of pseudoscientific medical products). Thus, the editors of medical disinformation websites are neither …
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Feature Article
Remembering Kendrick Frazier, Part Two
Some memorials and funerals are so well attended that they spill over into adjacent rooms. Extra chairs are brought out, and an audio or video feed extends the gathering beyond the usual limits. Something similar happened to us as we began to assemble the remembrances of Kendrick Frazier, the editor of Skeptical Inquirer for the …
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Feature Article
The Curious Case of the Carolina Lizard Man Benjamin Radford
Among the mysterious creatures said to lurk in the United States, the Lizard Man is surely among the strangest: seven feet tall, powerful, aggressive, and incredibly fast. It’s never harmed anyone, though it allegedly chews on automobiles. It was first sighted late at night near a butterbean field in the Scape Ore Swamp near the …
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Remembrance
Harriet Hall Stepped Up Susan Gerbic
Harriet A. Hall was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 2, 1945, and died on January 11, 2023, in Puyallup, Washington. Soon after her death, Richard Saunders replayed a 2007 episode of his podcast, The Skeptic Zone, in which he interviewed Hall while they were both on a James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) cruise …
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Remembrance
A Great Doctor’s Rest (An Elegy for Harriet Hall) Joe Nickell
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From the Interim Editor
Medical Pseudoscience: Here and Abroad, Old and New Stuart Vyse
Despite recent dazzling scientific advances (e.g., mRNA vaccines), medical pseudoscience and health misinformation have emerged as some of the most serious problems of the modern age, providing skeptics and supporters of science-based medicine with new opportunities and challenges. But even as new variants of medical misinformation are spread on the internet, many old forms of …
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Harriet ‘SkepDoc’ Hall (1945–2023) William M. London
Beginning with her first published article in 2003, Harriet Hall, MD, gained a devoted following of scientists, health professionals, and consumers around the world who treasured her clarity, wisdom, wit, insight, intellectual humility, and humanity. Her many writings, lectures, and other media appearances addressed a wide range of topics, including pseudoscience, questionable health claims, quackery, …
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Virulent: The Vaccine War Takes on the Anti-Vaccine Movement Stuart Vyse
A new film, dedicated to CSI Fellow and Skeptical Inquirer columnist Harriet “SkepDoc” Hall, describes the rise of the anti-vaccination movement from long before COVID-19 to the present day. The film’s executive producer is Academy Award–winning documentarian Mark Jonathan Harris, and the film is produced by Laura Davis and directed and edited by TjardusGreidanus. Virulent …
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Suspected QAnon Founder Admits Conspiracy Theory Is Bogus Benjamin Radford
In a sworn government deposition, James Watkins (the man widely believed to be behind QAnon) admitted that the conspiracy movement is bogus and “a boogeyman.” Watkins, who founded the 8kun message board where QAnon first emerged, was called to testify by the January 6 Select Committee on June 6, 2022, and the transcript of this …
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2020 Voter Fraud Conspiracists Lose Steam—and Elections Benjamin Radford
In a heartening sign for critical thinking and democracy, American voters largely rejected conspiracy-embracing Donald Trump–backed Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections. Hundreds of Republican candidates at one point or another echoed Trump talking points and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 elections, though only about three dozen explicitly and directly endorsed …
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Biden Administration Introduces Scientific Integrity Effort Stuart Vyse
Soon after entering office, President Joe Biden launched a multi-agency Task Force on Scientific Integrity to restore “trust in government through scientific integrity and evidence-based policy making.” In January 2023, the group released its sixty-six-page document, “A Framework for Federal Scientific Integrity Policy and Practice.” According to a February 11, 2023, report in The Lancet, …
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Timothy Caulfield Awarded Order of Canada for Battling Health Misinformation Stuart Vyse
CSI Fellow and CSICon 2022 speaker Timothy Caulfield was awarded the Order of Canada in late December 2022. According to the official website, “The Order of Canada is how our country honours people who make extraordinary contributions to the nation.” Since its inception in 1967, 7,600 people have been invested into the Order. Caulfield’s award …
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Predictors of Susceptibility to Health Misinformation William M. London
Communication researchers from the University of Maryland reviewed sixty-one studies published between 2004 and 2022 to understand why people are susceptible to health misinformation. The researchers placed the psychological predictors into four categories: 1) Ability to reason accurately (expected to reduce susceptibility); 2) Motivation to reason accurately (expected to reduce susceptibility); 3) Directionally motivated reasoning—meaning …
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Investigative Files
Solving the Disappearance of Judge Crater Joe Nickell
Of missing persons, few are more notoriously unique than New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater, who, on the evening of August 6, 1930, waved goodbye to a couple he had just dined with and vanished into the night. No credible explanation has been forthcoming—until now. Meanwhile, Judge Crater was reportedly seen far …
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Notes on a Strange World
The ‘Failed’ Psychic: A Sad Story and a Warning Massimo Polidoro
In January 1981, U.S. television and newspapers began to pay attention to a young man who introduced himself with the mysterious and exotic name of “Song Chai” and claimed to possess extraordinary psychokinetic abilities. The young man recounted that he had been in Tibet for years, where a spiritual master had taught him to discover …
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The Philosopher’s Corner
The Fallacy Game Massimo Pigliucci
One of the first things one learns as a skeptic is the classification of so-called logical fallacies. Indeed, there is a whole website, Your Logical Fallacy Is, devoted to instructing skeptics on how to play the fallacy game (see https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/). The popular internet destination (290k “likes” and counting) tells us: “This site has been designed …
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Reality Is the Best Medicine
Health Effects of Loneliness Harriet Hall
People have had to socially distance because of the pandemic, bringing more attention to the health effects of isolation and loneliness, and there is alarming news: According to the National Institute on Aging, the health risks of prolonged isolation are equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day (Kroll 2022). Social isolation andloneliness have even been …
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Scientific Contagion Spoils the Magic of Religion Stuart Vyse
University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin is a magician—of a sort. A century before Rozin began practicing magic, Scottish anthropologist James Frazer (1854–1941) coined the term sympathetic magic in his classic volume The Golden Bough (1935) and identified two primary principles of sympathetic magic: similarity and contagion. According to similarity, things that have the appearance …
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The Practical Skeptic
Into the Lion’s Den: Conferences as Skeptical Activism Mick West
Practical skepticism often involves engaging with the people whose ideas you are skeptical of. One of the best ways of doing this is by attending a conference held by and for those people. I’ve been to a few such events; the first one was titled Consciousness beyond Chemtrails. I attended that one mostly because of …
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The Time Warp: Skepticism Revisited—from the Future
Wooooooo: Old Bovines in New Twaddle Craig A. Foster, Emalee L. Sickles, and Emily E. Camp
Welcome aboard, friends! In “The Time Warp,” we aren’t limited to present-day examination. We use Skeptical Inquirer’s rich history to examine skepticism … from the future. On this voyage, we travel to Spring/Summer 1977 to review the second issue in the Skeptical Inquirer lineage (Vol. 1, no. 2). Some context to summon the spirt of …
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Skeptical Inquiree
Mysteries of the Ica Stones Benjamin Radford
Q: What’s the story behind the Ica Stones, the rocks in Peru connected with ancient alien theories? —Daniel M. A: Called by archaeology professor Kenny Feder (2010) “one of the most transparent and absurd archaeological hoaxes,” the story of the Ica Stones is also fascinating and complex. It began nearly sixty years ago when Dr. …
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Review
Moore (and Yet More Moore) on the Scopes Trial Glenn Branch
After a trial held over eight scorching days in July 1925, John Thomas Scopes, a young teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was convicted of violating a recently enacted state law forbidding educators in the state’s public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, …
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Letters to the Editor
Letters – Vol. 47, no. 3
Autism Politics I would like to point out a factual error in the article “Autism Politics and the Death of Truth and Freedom” by Stuart Vyse (January/February 2023). Vyse stated that autism is a “psychiatric disorder.” This is incorrect. Although still listed as psychiatric in the DSM, it is actually neurological in origin, not psychological. …
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