{"id":2991,"date":"2008-09-30T07:50:43","date_gmt":"2008-09-30T07:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/09\/30\/unintentional-irony-in-alterna\/"},"modified":"2008-09-30T07:50:43","modified_gmt":"2008-09-30T07:50:43","slug":"unintentional-irony-in-alterna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/09\/30\/unintentional-irony-in-alterna\/","title":{"rendered":"Unintentional Irony in “Alternative” Medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times<\/cite> today has an article on scientific studies of “alternative” medicine<\/a>. Quack-bashing isn’t my usual line, but it seemed to me like there was a good bit of stuff that will torque Orac off. I couldn’t help laughing at the final paragraph, though:<\/p>\n

\n

“In tight funding times, that’s going to get worse,” said Dr. Khalsa of Harvard, who is doing a clinical trial on whether yoga can fight insomnia. “It’s a big problem. These grants are still very hard to get and the emphasis is still on conventional medicine, on the magic pill or procedure that’s going to take away all these diseases.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This, of course, is in contrast to “alternative” medicine, where the emphasis is on finding the magic… magic to take away all these diseases.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(As an aside, does anyone else hear the phrase “alternative medicine” and picture a painfully thin doctor dressed in black, smoking clove cigarettes, and talking about how acupuncture used to be really cool, but since they sold out and started getting major funding for clinical trials, they totally suck? Or is that just me?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times today has an article on scientific studies of “alternative” medicine. Quack-bashing isn’t my usual line, but it seemed to me like there was a good bit of stuff that will torque Orac off. I couldn’t help laughing at the final paragraph, though: “In tight funding times, that’s going to get worse,”… Continue reading Unintentional Irony in “Alternative” Medicine<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-medicine","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2991\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}