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Oh goody. Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine Day is fast approaching. scienceblogs.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from scienceblogs.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
I sometimes catch flak for repeating this, but there was a time when I thought there might be something to acupuncture. I don't care, because, as a blogger, when I write a post I assume that a significant fraction of people reading it have never seen this blog before and therefore aren't even the least bit familiar with what I've written before on the subject. That makes them a blank slate, as far as this blog is concerned, and obliges me to explain everything. ....
So I was distracted yesterday from what I had intended to write about by an irresistible target provided me courtesy of Toby Cosgrove, MD, CEO of The Cleveland Clinic, who bemoaned all those nasty pro-science advocates who had had the temerity to link the antivaccine rant by the director of the Clinic's Wellness Institute to the quackery practiced there of whose affinity for antivaccine quackery Cosgrove appears to be oblivious. So I took care of that target, and now I'm back to the topic I had wanted to apply some Insolence to. ....
As hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when I didn't think that acupuncture was quackery, an ancient "Eastern" treatment that "evolved" from bloodletting not unlike bloodletting in ancient "Western" bloodletting. This time was, hard as it is to believe, less than eight years ago, right around the time just before I got involved with my not-so-super-secret other blog. I figured that, because acupuncture involves sticking needles into the body, maybe there might be something to it. ....