science Friday, March 9, 2012. Post by David Bradley

A few days ago, I suggested we have a BS abbreviation on Twitter. It would be like the RT (retweet), DM (direct message), HT (hat tip) etc that we all know and love, but it would, of course be shorthand for referring to bovine faeces and could be associated with links to disinformation, spurious statistical studies and pseudoscience unsupported by proper evidence, for instance.

One area that is ripe for the BS tag is so-called Integrative Medicine. This is the supposed holistic combination alternative medicine with conventional medicine that is meant to provide a better approach to personal wellbeingpractitioners get the best of both worlds: the potential for a proper cure (courtesy of the conventional) and the potential for a big fat fee for doing very little if anything at all and for a bottle of sugar pills (courtesy of the complementary).

However, Integrative Medicine is to Alternative Therapies as Intelligent Design is to Creationism.

Scam? sCAM? BS!

One might use the programmers NOT symbol ! in front of the BS to represent something that is most certainly not the ordure of bovine ruminants. I.e. !BS

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Integrative medicine BS