The Weekly Doubt | Issue 1

Posted 2:06pm Sunday 28th February 2016

Of all the strange things I encounter in indulging my love and hate of alternative ideas, the placebo effect is the strangest. A guest writer covered this last year but I wanted to revisit it to hammer home just how weird the placebo effect is. What marks the placebo effect out from other wacky Read more...

Sceptic Schism | Issue 26

Posted 3:40pm Sunday 4th October 2015

This morning a friend sent me a link to an article called “Bad Diet the Number One Cause of ADHD”. The author claims food colouring causes ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) in children and that the condition does not exist in countries that do not use the dyes. I Read more...

Sceptic Schism | Issue 25

Posted 2:02pm Sunday 27th September 2015

Conservatives are a bunch of meat-eating, game-hunting, tax-decreasing, hard-drinking, Bible-bashing, black-and-white-thinking, immigration-hating, oil-fracking-loving, morally dogmatic philistines. Liberals are a bunch of bike-riding, tree-hugging, whale-saving, big-government-promoting, Read more...

Sceptic Schism | Issue 24

Posted 2:30pm Sunday 20th September 2015

If you decide whether to have tea or coffee in the morning, there’s probably no radical analysis of the situation going on in your head. If you sense straight away that your friend is happy to see you, you don’t have to stop and slowly analyse their body language and speech patterns to Read more...

Sceptic Schism | Issue 23

Posted 2:11pm Sunday 13th September 2015

What’s the grossest thing you would do for attention and money? Go on a reality TV show? Film a sex tape? Marry Donald Trump? In Victorian Britain, there was a type of con-artist and liar willing to do something grosser than any of that. They were the “mediums”, and they took Read more...

Sceptic Schism | Issue 22

Posted 3:07pm Sunday 6th September 2015

The belief that vitamin C helps with colds and boosts the immune system is so prevalent that probably everybody reading this, including me, has taken a vitamin C tablet in their life. Scurvy is a disease that most people associate with sailors losing teeth from their bleeding gums and is caused Read more...

Sceptic Schism | Issue 21

Posted 2:14pm Sunday 30th August 2015

Colonic irrigation is a process that its proponents claim will remove nonspecific “toxins” from the colon and intestinal tract. Water or other liquids are injected into the colon via a tube inserted into the rectum. It’s basically an enema that goes a lot further up. The idea is to Read more...

Sceptic Schism | Issue 20

Posted 2:36pm Sunday 16th August 2015

The internet is full of fake Einstein quotes that people attach to him to make others pay attention. For example, Einstein is famously credited with saying, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination Read more...

Sceptic Schism | Issue 19

Posted 2:18pm Sunday 9th August 2015

I magine you buy a new pair of assless rubber underpants (I’m not judging) and you wear them the day that you happen to get your dream job at the waterslide-testing and kitten-cuddling factory. On the same day, you get asked out by the guy from the Old Spice ads, and land a six-digit Read more...

Sceptic Schism | Issue 18

Posted 3:22pm Sunday 2nd August 2015

Natural News, a “health/wellbeing website” has 1.5 million followers on Facebook. Scrolling down their page I see articles on why vaccines are harming us, how avocados can cure leukaemia, and how microwaves eliminate all nutrients from food. Any of these could be the topic of a sceptic Read more...