Larry Hosken: New: Book Report: Trick or Treatment

It's a book about alternative medicine. Going in, I had some idea of what I wanted to learn. I figured that some alternative medicines are probably good for curing some things... but probably not good all the things that some frauds say they're good for. But I was curious to know what they were good for, exactly. This book talks about that.

Oh yeah, and I learned that "First, do no harm", while an awesome thing, isn't from the Hippocratic Oath, like I thought it was. I learned that Florence Nightengale was a skilled statistician. And I learned yet another reason that sharks go endangered: for a while, sharks were going extinct because some asshole wrote a book Sharks Don't Get Cancer claiming that sharks didn't get cancer and that a way for humans to avoid cancer was to do strange things with shark cartilage. It didn't work, but meanwhile plenty of sharks were killed for their cartilage. The book's evidence wasn't convincing, but the title sure was memorable. Someone needs to write a book called Sharks Get Cancer, Acne, Arthritis, Impotence, and their Fins are Nasty in Soup, somehow make that title catchy, and then maybe the shark population will recover.

Tags: book sturgeon's law mad science

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