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myrna loy's lazy twin's avatar

This is a nice, long, science-based and very detailed post with plenty of references... just the sort of thing that SBM used to publish.

Joking aside, they've published a lot of posts on quackery, which is a good thing because a naturopath treating cancer with turmeric is going to kill people. A lot of their pieces are basically polemics, which is rather defensible when you're writing about stuff like cupping, where there really isn't a good argument for the practice. But polemics don't really work that well when the evidence is not clear-cut, and they often publish polemics where the evidence isn't clear. I've noticed that in some cases, the pieces tend to fall into the category of "destroying" something and then overstate the evidence or insist that there's no ambiguity when there most certainly is. If that's your site's general tone, chances are that your authors will take the same approach for stuff where the science isn't clear, but the author has strong opinions.

It's unfortunate, because overall, it means that people will question the articles on the site that are strongly grounded in science.

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Alex's avatar

Hrm, saw this elsewhere, not sure if if changes the point but you say "Lovell’s 0.89% rate isn’t found anywhere in the report she links to and I’m not going to try to figure out where she got it." but it seems like the ".89" percent of children abused is pretty clearly on page 2 of that report: "Approximately one-fifth (16.7 percent) of the children investigated were found

to be victims of abuse or neglect—a rate of 8.9 per 1,000 children in the population." https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/canstats.pdf

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