Month: March 2025

The American Medical Association and the Fight Against Quackery (2015)

Daniel Loxton (Old) Insight blog, Posts , , ,

This article was originally published at the defunct Insight blog at Skeptic.com on June 14, 2015. An archived version is available here.

“The American Medical Association is finally taking a stand on quacks like Dr. Oz,” announced a post yesterday by Julia Belluz. A health writer at Vox, Belluz has emerged as a sharp critic of popular medical talk show personality Dr. Mehmet Oz with posts such as this, this, and this. (I recommend her thoughtful reflection on the ethics, challenges, and public health concerns of countering medical misinformers, titled “How should journalists cover quacks like Dr. Oz or the Food Babe?” Generations of skeptical critics of quackery have asked those same troubling questions.)
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Ghosts, Knowing, and a Lesson at Bedtime (2013)

Daniel Loxton (Old) Skepticblog, Posts , , , ,

This article was originally published at the defunct Skepticblog.org on Sep 11, 2013.
An archived version is available here

Story time is a big deal at the Loxton household. For years, my young son and I have been working through a stack of some of the great adventure novels, just as my dad used to read poetry to me and my brothers. I’m delighted by my son’s edge-of-his-seat immersion in the worlds of hobbits and pirates and talking lions.

On other nights, we lie awake talking about ideas. As Carl Sagan once said, “Kids can understand some pretty deep things.”1 My son has long since discovered the irresistible trick of asking fascinating questions about those deep things right after I turn off the lights. I’m a sucker every time. Recently, our conversation turned to “true” ghost stories related by his young colleagues on the playground.
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