junk science

The plaintiffs claim that Ocean Spray lied about not using artificial flavors, and the only restitution is for the company to hand over a big bag of money. How big? Very big. They want a jury to award them "statutory, compensatory, treble, and punitive damages." That's all due to a technicality that hasn't affected their lives one iota.
Researchers, believe it or not, ingested Lego toys to see how quickly they could be, um, excreted. Yes, this actually took place. This "work" was published in a journal.
Dr. Oz is what would happen if Alex Jones and Mother Jones had a baby. And perhaps short of murdering somebody on live TV, there is literally nothing Dr. Oz won't say or do for money.
Race, age and other demographic factors are commonly controlled in epidemiology studies. It makes no sense to compare one group to another group if researchers do not bother to control for confounders – that is, factors like race or age that can cause researchers to draw the wrong conclusion.
Dr. Oz is a fraud who ought to be fired from Columbia University and have his medical license revoked. Instead, he's headed to the White House.
A hot rock massage and herbal tea might make you feel nice, but they don't actually cure anything. Pointing that out in China, however, might land a person in jail.
One of the biggest goals of autism research is to determine its cause. And one of the best ways to achieve that is to rule out the things that don't cause it. So let's acknowledge this month by doing just that.
In 1995, an activist husband-and-wife team published Dressed to Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras. Because scaring people is an excellent way to make money, it's time for a second edition this year. Also, they're recruiting women into a sham cohort study to "prove" their wacky belief that the latter causes the former.
It's been 50 years since Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich published his anti-population growth screed, The Population Bomb. Although he scared some folks and annoyed more, most of the deadly consequences he foresaw just didn't happen.
Like a series of bad sequels, the media is back with yet another terribly botched story. This time, the claim is that using household cleaning sprays is like smoking 20 cigarettes per day. Wrong again.
Why is asparagine, a rather boring molecule that biology majors are forced to memorize, grabbing international headlines? It can be found foods containing protein – which are many – including asparagus, the vegetable after which it was named. But some in the media say it causes cancer, which means asparagus causes cancer. (We're not kidding.)
One of the many problems with academia is that it allows nutcases to flourish.