The Global Summit systematic review claims that spinal manipulation therapy is not effective in preventing any non-musculoskeletal disorders. But a breakaway group has challenged their findings, in part based on my arguments regarding evidence hierarchies. Are they correct? Does my critique undermine the Global Summit review? If so, does the evidence base favour chiropractic?
Pressure mounts upon equalities minister Kemi Badenoch to resign over the UK government’s failure to ban conversion therapies. Attention has focused on the government’s failure to publish research commissioned in 2018. But evidence about whether conversion therapy works is irrelevant: conversion therapy is not a medical intervention.
By definition, I begin, Alternative Medicine, I continue, Has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine. —Tim Minchin, Storm In his beat-poem Storm, the musician and comedian Tim Minchin lays …
In 1983, Larry Laudan proclaimed the “Demise of the Demarcation Problem” (Laudan 1983). I will argue that the ‘simple demarcation’ problem should indeed be abandoned. However, abandoning the quest for simple demarcation does not entail that demarcation problems are intractable. Though the dream of a single criterion to demarcate ‘science’ …
