Fatherhood, Skeptically

COVID-19. It's everywhere either literally or figuratively. If you're like a couple friends of mine who have been looking for some scientific perspective, you're probably worried about how you can protect your kids. I'd like to do what little I can to shed some light on that. Before I start, I'd like to make a little disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor, or epidemiologist. If you have significant concerns of any form, you're best bet is to get it from the source. For the disease itself, I'll leave the important information to the CDC . Their info is likely to be the most robust and is concise enough for any level of understanding. They'll also keep it updated so it'll be the most relevant. Obviously, following their recommendations is probably your best bet. Though avoiding the disease should be your number one goal, the recorded cases in children have largely presented as mild. So unless your child is immunocompromised, they will likely weather t...

One of the big difficulties when dealing with pseudoscience is it's ability to hide its misinformation behind a thin veil of scientific jargon. As far as popular pseudosciences go, chiropractic is one of the best at this; and it is incredibly frustrating. Chiropractic, at its core, depends on magic. To use that as a basis of medical practice is unethical to say the least. To use it on children, as we'll discuss further down, is simply obscene. Some chiropractors even practice on infants (even newborns) which can lead to disastrous  consequences. But before we get too far, lets unmask this "alternative therapy" and show its true, baseless face. Chiropractic was started by Daniel David Palmer in 1895. He firmly believed that a life force, that he called “Innate,” was responsible for good health and was blocked by “vertebral subluxation,” that could be cured by spinal manipulation. So from jump, we have a magical life force being the basis of the practice; this is a p...

I was recently directed to a blog post  via a parent that discussed whether or not mental pharmaceutical treatment was preventing modern prophecy. This interesting perspective is brought by Vironika Tugaleva, a self proclaimed life coach who has authored two self help books. Now, setting aside the obvious differences in Religious beliefs that are likely to come up, the arguments she gives in this post have some clear issues, both factually and, if I'm going to be honest, ethically. Let's dive in to them. Let's begin by looking at the context given for the discussion. An individual named Ken Dickson and his book, detailing his personal experience in dealing with his mental illnesses, that lead her to some interesting conclusions. She makes three observations about Ken's experience: Everyone around him thought he was crazy and dangerous while Ken gained abilities that some people vie to access with daily meditation and ceremony Our current mental health care syst...

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume most everyone knows what asthma is. Basically, it is when you have a reaction that causes your lung airways to become inflamed, causing a decrease in lung function. Given the sudden onset of asthma attacks, the highly effective medications, and the necessity of, you know, breathing it never occurred to me that parents would ever dabble into woo where asthma was involved. Boy was I wrong. As I've mentioned, I'm a member of a local skeptic group. One of the members gave me an example she came across of a parent giving, frankly, wildly inappropriate suggestions for the treatment of an asthmatic child. We'll discuss those in a moment. First, lets discuss that which elicited the response. A parent was distressed that her child didn't seem to be improving with normal treatment. Additionally, she was concerned that her counter, "looked like a pharmacy." Now, given the time frame she provided and the lack of other medi...

This first post I wanted to be an extension of the blog description in the header. Specifically, I want to expand on the things that led to my conclusion that there was a niche in skepticism, parenting, that needed filling. I like to consider myself fairly active in the skeptical community. I am, at the time of this writing, a graduate student studying chemistry, I am an administrator of a local skeptical community's Facebook page where I am partly responsible for setting up meetings, demonstrations, etc. Finally, I work tirelessly to apply skepticism to my everyday life. So why parenting; why not a broader topic; why not focus on academia? There are a couple reasons. First, I have noticed that a fair amount of the fear and uncertainty that leads people into pseudoscience comes form wanting to do right by our children; do give them their best possible start in life. The sad irony is that many delve into pseudoscience and end up putting their children in unnecessary danger...