Fatherhood, Skeptically

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...

One of the group's I'm involved in on Facebook is a parent support group for children with emotional and learning difficulty. I've only recently (at the time of writing) been actively interacting with the group for a little while but there's a clear leaning towards pseudoscience in some "therapies" for these kiddos. This is actually pretty understandable. Behavioral difficulties can become unmanageable really fast. And parents, most of whom don't have the training to cope (I'm lucky to have had classes via foster care training) can get unraveled really quickly. Even those trained, myself included, can become overwhelmed. It's a truly difficult and frightening thing to deal with. But this doesn't mean you should look to alternative therapies; quite the opposite. In my honest opinion, all that will do is waste time you could be spending finding a treatment plan that will actually help, and help long term. This brings me to the u...