Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I am your host, Massimo Pilucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gileff.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, Massimo, the topic of our podcast as a whole is about the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

So in this episode, we're going to look at a few examples of practices that are sort of

in the gray zone between meaningful and evidence-based scientific practices and Wu.

So we're going to...

We're not going to give a formal definition of woo, right?

No. It's woo. It's woo. Exactly. Yeah.

So, and these various practices themselves occupy different locations in that gray zone. Some of them darker, some of them lighter.

But so the topics we're going to discuss are acupuncture and yoga and meditation and chiropractic,

which, to varying degrees, have some positive effects, some, you know, documented positive effects.

And also to varying degrees come bundled with a lot of mysticism and false claims.

So we're just going to try to

disentangle some of the false from the true claims and talk about how much evidence there is

for which claims. As opposed to say it completely, you know, pseudo-belief such as, say,

Omeopathy, where we both know that the theory doesn't hold up and the practice

has been shown to not do anything beyond the placebo effect. Right. So that's out of our gray zone.

Right. Exactly. That's less interesting, really. Right. Okay. So shall we start with say,

you know, acupuncture for instance? Uh, sure. Well, maybe before we get into any of the science,

...