Nobody has ever made the claim that an atomic bomb would heal you of your foot corns and cure your cancer.

Radiation, on the other hand, has at least had some inroads into the second claim.

The same cannot be said for acupuncture. Nor, for that matter, could acupuncture be turned into a weapon of mass destruction. It would have to be effective for that to happen.

Magical thinking is the culprit – and I’m sorry, but “in some cases” as a case for some alternative therapies is synonymous with “anecdotal,” and the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”

Regarding child vegetarianism, I have vegie friends who feed their kids meat, and will continue to do so until the children are old enough to make their own lifestyle decision. I applaud them for that, especially since preparing meat is so distasteful for them.

Vitamin megadoses may not cause problems for some people but I’m yet to be convinced of any benefit. Gorillas may share 96 percent of our genetic makeup but they’re still not people. Better than most people certainly but just because they’ve evolved to eat more vegies (bamboo and roots etc) than we do doesn’t mean we could exist on the same diet or even benefit from that diet.

Maybe by leaving these people to scam, it’ll help push the species to evolving once again. Since we’re curing many diseases, “correcting” mutations, and creating extraordinarily resilient bacteria (while not creating resilient immune systems), we’ve stopped evolving anything other than our brains.. and even that has been retarded by the elimination of these fine craftspeople and (scam)artists!

CJSF

“Vit C mega doses may or may not be of some use…”

I know of people who have wound up with ascorbic acid crystals forming in their kidneys (and causing pain and damage) due to megadoses of vitamin C.

Having had kidney stones myself (oxylate, not vitamin C related), I hope you continue to get enough fluids so you pass the excess vitamins painlessly.

Or maybe just “child endangerment.”

But ad servers look at the content of the site and serve ads based on the words – not the intent. So they get a lot of ads for books authored by fox “journalists.”

My site is about model airplanes. Because the word “air” is used a lot I get tons of ads about air conditioning which has nothing to do with anything on my site. I think I mention air conditioning once in the 700+ pages when I’m talking about setting up a shop.

Anyway you have the right idea. Most sites – particularly by us little people who don’t do it professionally, evolve a lot as we learn more and get more content that needs to be organized and easy to find. I’ve reorganized my entire site perhaps a dozen times and with as many pages as there are now it takes weeks to do it.

Sorry for the o/t Phil. Thanks for the new source of ammo (Tim for creating it and Phil for telling us about it).

In the U.K., we do give our blood; we don’t sell it. This means there’s no incentive for a donor to try to sneak their blood through if they know they’re infected.

There was a serious problem with haemophiliacs some years back, largely owing to lack of relevant information at the time, but nowadays, it’s probably about as safe as it can get.

Donors are screened pretty thoroughly before every donation, and the blood is also screened.
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Perhaps I should relabel that category “Child vegetarianism” or something like that to make it more clear.

Now, about Vegans,,, please note that the majority of the worlds population have to get by w/o meat in their diets so that they are, by necessity, vegetarians. Vegans make an ethical choice to eschew meat, because we treat animals as though they are a manufactured product, rather than living beings subject to the same ills and pain we all experience. My daughter has been a vegetarian/vegan since she was 16 years old. At 36 years old, she seems in excellent health, though she has to take zinc supplements, since plants do not fix zinc in their tissues.( The zinc we get from eating animals is ingested by the critters when they eat grass and the dirt in which they grow. Vegans don’t have that dietary access.)

Though I tend toward the carnivore side, I do recognize the value of plants,,,sometimes they’re pretty,,,

GAry 7

It just hits me in the chest. But frankly, I gotta ask something I often ask when kids are involved in this… Good thing the naturopath murderer is in jail, but what about the PARENTS? How come the parents were not jailed as well? They are victims of their own lack of knowledge, yes, but I’m pretty sure that there are other cases were your incompetence towards your child can get you jailed.

I hope they didn’t have more kids.

It’s their choice, not the child’s. And if the child were given a choice, it’s been brainwashed into following the J.W.’s teachings.
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I in no way deny that JWs have antiscience beliefs. But the refusal of blood transfusions for spiritual reasons is not one of them. If I don’t deny that smoking kills but that in the end I prefer to smoke and live with the outcome, that isn’t antiscience it is just a personal decision many would disagree with.

They don’t deny the benefits of blood transfusions. They do deny that blood transfusions are always necessary in situations where they are commonly used and have promoted alternative surgical methods in certain cases, but none of the stories on the site about JWs fall into this realm.

If we want to label all religious and spiritual thought as antiscience then we could do so but I think you’ll find a lot less support for that (though I do think that pretty much all religious and spiritual thought is most likely wrong).

Since the site includes as “harm” someone giving up their career to pursue their spiritual beliefs then the much more significant economic “harm” of JWs is in their discouragement of post-secondary education.

I do realize that a few of my existing cases are somewhat weak. The site has only been online for three weeks, and I’ve only been researching it for about three and a half months. We’ve got a long way to go yet. I expect to fill out some of the categories with more cases, add new categories, and probably cull some of the weaker cases as I go on. I’ve already rearranged some categories once or twice. I plan to take the Y2K category and fold it into “fear of the apocalypse”.

For the person who complained about the shortness of the summaries, every story has at least one, sometimes as many as four supporting links. I encourage you to explore them to find out more details about each person. Maybe I need to make that more clear.

And for the complaint about the search: I’m using Google, and I’m at the mercy of whether their crawler has covered my site. If something doesn’t appear, its because they haven’t crawled that page yet. And as for the ads, AdSense does not let you block enough ad URLs to really guarantee that pseudoscience or paranormal topics will not appear. So I haven’t even attempted to try. I’ll continue to research that as I tweak the site.

Thanks for all the comments.

Just because a bomb didn’t go off doesn’t necessarily mean that there never was a bomb. It could also be saying that someone disarmed it before the boom.

Take the creationism one. It was a bar fight, guys! If they hadn’t got into an argument about creationism v. evolution, then chances are that they would’ve argued about something else – Kylie’s a better singer than Madonna perhaps?

Hm. Maybe that would’ve been put down to death caused by Mariolatry?

Then again, some were just plain stupidity. Darwin Awards anyone?
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That said, take the conventional medical treatment as well as the alternative therapy.

Just be sure the conventional treatment isn’t spelt V-I-O-X-X!

Quick story – about 18 months ago I suffered an abscess on a tooth. Dentist prescribed an antibiotic before operating on it. He never mentioned any side effects of the medication, nor did the chemist (pharmacist) when I had the prescription filled. I checked on the net for the side effects of this antibiotic (Clindamycin) one of which was bleeding from the bowel that could start several weeks after finishing the course of tablets.

About a month later I started bleeding from the bowel. Cutting a long story short, it was concluded that it was caused by the proliferation of a bacterium (Clostridium difficile) which is resistant to Clindamycin. If I hadn’t checked the side effects at the time of taking the Clindamycin I doubt I would have made the connection with it & the bleeding.

The point I’m trying to make is, just because you’re being treated with conventional medicine doesn’t mean it’s not going to harm you. Never check your scepticism at the door!

<enthusiatic>clap! clap! clap!</enthusiatic>

Well said. We skeptics do, indeed, sometimes tie ourselves into recursive knots, missing the bigger picture. Thanks for clarifying things.

Also, good on you for saying, in effect, RTFFAQ.