Fake news has been in the news a lot lately. Fake news proliferated wildly during the 2016 U.S. election, much of it completely fabricated, usually with an extreme partisan bias. Fake news is corrosive. It mis-informs the public, divides people against one another, leads to bad policy decisions, and can even induce people to take action against imaginary threats.

One might think that medical literature is immune to this kind of fakery, but it's not. Recent years have seen the appearance of journals from mainstream publishers that are based entirely on pseudoscience. On the surface, these publications look and act just like real scientific journals, but it's all just pretend. The publishers of these journals presumably care more about their bottom line than about scientific integrity. They know (or seem to know) that journals about pseudoscience will create a never-ending demand for fake breakthroughs and science-y sounding studies that are built on a house of cards.

~~~but as you might guess, the Journal of Magical Medicine doesn't exist. Instead, we have multiple journals devoted entirely to something just as fanciful and just as unbelievable: acupuncture. Here are three examples:

The Journal of Acupuncture and Meridian Studies, published by Elsevier
Acupuncture in Medicine, published by BMJ
Chinese Medicine, published by BioMed Central (owned by Springer)

These aren't the only ones, but they'll do for an illustration. I can't help pointing out that the Elsevier journal has a bonus bit of magic in its name: "meridians" are a completely imaginary concept, referring to invisible lines of energy that supposedly flow through the body. This is a perfect (if unintentional) example of magical medicine. How nice that Elsevier provides a journal for people who want to study it.


more~~~http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2017/01/03/fake-medical-journals-are-spreading-and-they-are-filled-with-bad-science/#275b84df68cb