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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Exaggerating conflicts of interest to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vaccines

Remember Gayle DeLong? Last summer, DeLong published a paper in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, entitled A Positive Association found between Autism Prevalence and Childhood Vaccination uptake across the U.S. Population. As I pointed out at the time, it showed nothing of the sort. Besides botching the introduction by citing a panoply of […]

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Medicine Quackery

The boneyard of forgotten woo, but better

A fascination with quackery was one of the things that inspired me to start this blog. Some of it was disbelief that anyone could take some of the modalities that I write about seriously. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples of this reaction was when I first learned that there were people who are […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski strikes again

I was originally going to write about an amazing article that appeared in the NEJM today, but then, as happens all too often, something more compelling caught my eye. Unfortunately, it’s compelling in exactly the wrong way. It’s infuriating and saddening, all at the same time. It’s also yet another example of how it’s so […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Medicine Politics Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Politics versus science

I’ve always been reluctant to attribute antiscientific attitudes to one political persuasion or another–and justly so, or so I thought. While it’s true that antiscience on the right is definitely more prominent these days, with the Republican candidates conducting virtual seminars on how to deny established science. Evolution? They don’t believe in it because, apparently, […]