Eons ago, Emily and I wrote an editorial in the now defunct Journal of Family Practice [1] on the topic of alternative medicine. It was titled "Science and the Alternative" which sort of gives away our opinions (see also).
Oh, to be clear, it's not that I think herbal remedies can't work (for example), but rather that it's magical thinking to assume they're fundamentally safe because they're "natural".
Today CV tackles the topic, after discovering, to his horror, that his readership doesn't necessarily know what science is ...
Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory | Cosmic Variance
...If we can show that psychic phenomena are incompatible with the laws of physics we currently understand, then our task is to balance the relative plausibility of “some folks have fallen prey to sloppy research, unreliable testimony, confirmation bias, and wishful thinking” against “the laws of physics that have been tested by an enormous number of rigorous and high-precision experiments over the course of many years are plain wrong in some tangible macroscopic way, and nobody ever noticed...
[1] The name lives on but the journal died.
PS. I love that Michael Crichton, the climate change denier, is also a spoon bender.
