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Should Quack Busters and Other Rationalists Contribute to the Society for Science Based Medicine?

After the death of Wallace Sampson, MD, Stanford Professor of Medicine (Wally, as his friends knew him), the founding editors of the Society for Science Based Medicine (SfSBM) website, including Dr. Steven Novella, Dr. Harriet Hall and Dr. David Gorski, heaped praise on him.   Here is some of what they wrote: “ Wally was a valued member of the SBM community, a mentor to many of us, and a tireless crusader against health fraud and pseudoscience in medicine. He carried the banner of defending science and reason within medicine for a generation, and his is one of the giant shoulders on which SBM   currently rests ”  “ Wally was keen to identify and nurture new people interested in promoting science in medicine. As a much younger skeptic, prior to social media, when I was only running a new and obscure local skeptic group, Wally invited me to speak at conferences, and eventually to be one of the assistant editors for The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine . Such nurturin
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The Rational Mind is a Lonely Hunter

It has been a lonely business being an outspoken skeptic since the early days of the Great New Age/Alternative Medicine Mania, continuing today on New-Age Maui. In the early 1980s I and a few friends, most notably Honolulu Meals on Wheels Executive Director Alicia Leonhard and University of Hawaii Professor (Emeritus) Victor Stenger formed the Quackery Action Council (QAC), aka Hawaii Skeptics. We affiliated with the National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) and the Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). We organized lectures, seminars, workshops, and demonstrations. We walked on hot coals to mock and expose Tony Robbins and his scams. (We cost him so many customers he threatened to sue us.) On the day of the “Harmonic Convergence,” organized to celebrate New Age silliness and fantasies, we had our Skeptical Convergence with magic demonstrations, rationalist speakers and challenges to superstitious notions. We had taste tests to debunk the claim
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