Health Canada is finally making (baby) steps toward better informing the public when it comes to homeopathy.

As readers of the blog should know by now, homeopathy is based on really silly, counterfactual beliefs that, if true, would lead to a complete rewrite of biology and chemistry textbooks.

Despite this, Health Canada routinely approves homeopathic remedies for sale in Canada.

On July 31, 2015, it introduced “label changes” for certain homeopathic preparations.

Labels on nosodes, which are homeopathic preparations of heavily diluted infectious pus and spit sold as natural alternatives to vaccines, will have to mention this: “This product is neither a vaccine nor an alternative to vaccination. This product has not been proven to prevent infection. Health Canada does not recommend its use in children and advises that your child receive all routine vaccinations.” The change is effective January 1, 2016.

Secondly, “Health Canada is no longer allowing…

Antibodies are used a lot in research labs around the world and scientists tend to trust what’s on the label. But antibodies aren’t as reliable as researchers may think, with some scientists now arguing that “due diligence” in their use should include considerable time and money.

I remember comparing my own experimental results to published blots. We were in theory using the same antibody, and yet the pattern on the blot was completely different. Leave it to an eager principal investigator to squint really hard to see the band he or she wants to see.

“Scientists often know, anecdotally, that some antibodies in their field are problematic, but it has been difficult to gauge the size of the problem across biology as a whole. Perhaps the largest assessment comes from work published by the Human Protein Atlas, a Swedish consortium that aims to generate antibodies for every protein in the…

Finally, two items of good news come out of this dreadful affair in which Aboriginal families stopped chemotherapeutic treatment for their leukemic daughters and sought nonsensical pseudoscientific treatment in Florida.

While one of the children passed away this winter, the other, known in the media as “J.J.”, is being reported as feeling well. Could it be that the raw vegan diet and the Aqua Chi Ionic Foot Bath really work to fight off cancerous tumours?

Or could it be that the family reversed their initial decision and sent their daughter back to chemotherapy?

“But [J.J. was feeling] good, as became abundantly clear, because she resumed chemo treatment in March, as soon as hospital tests confirmed that the cancer had returned.

My answer: yes.

Nature published a very lengthy and well-written piece by Kendall Powell on the postdoctoral fellowship. If you don’t know, the next step for many Ph.D. graduates is not a tenure-track position in a university but a sort of poorly paid specialization called the postdoctoral fellowship, whose funding is often uncertain and whose length can often stretch to absurdity.

“Many postdocs move on to fulfilling careers elsewhere, but those who want to continue in research can find themselves thwarted. They end up trapped as ‘permadocs’: doing multiple postdoc terms, staying in these positions for many years and, in a small but significant proportion, never leaving them. Of the more than 40,000 US postdocs in 2013, almost 4,000 had been so for more than 6 years.”

If you are interested in learning more about the less-than-stellar side of contemporary science, I encourage you to go read the full piece…