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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Sports

Thanks, Michael Phelps, for glamorizing cupping quackery!

So, in case you hadn’t noticed, I was taking a brief vacation, a long weekend if you will. As a result, I hadn’t planned on posting new completely original material until Wednesday or Thursday. (Monday’s post, some of you noticed, was a modified crosspost from my not-so-super-secret other blog.) Then something happened.

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

How should we deal with vaccine hesitancy, refusal, and antivaccine beliefs

As hard as it might be to believe, almost as long as there have been vaccinations, there has been an antivaccine movement, and as long as there has been an antivaccine movement, there have been parents who refuse to vaccinate. Indeed, in the 1800s, there were even groups with names like the Anti-Vaccination Society of […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine History Holocaust Medicine Quackery

The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 21: Oh, wait, maybe I am antivaccine after all

This is yet another in the continuing saga of “I’m not antivaccine,” a continuing series of posts demonstrating how the oh-so-loud and vigorous denials of antivaccine activists that they are antivaccine are in reality either a lie or self-delusion. There have been so many previous installments, twenty, to be precise. There could easily have been […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Combatting the alt-med stereotype of oncologists anxious to administer toxic chemotherapy

It is an article of faith among believers in alternative cancer cures that conventional oncology consists mainly of a bunch of money-hungry surgeons and oncologists who want nothing more than to cut, poison, and burn patients with cancer and charge them enormous sums of money to do so for as long as they can until […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Medicine Quackery

Why does Dr. Mercola sell supplements? Cognitive dissonance at its finest

A characteristic of real doctors and real health care providers is that they usually don’t sell the drugs and remedies that they recommend. Indeed, physicians are generally not allowed to in most states, as it’s considered a conflict of interest. Also, the Stark Law forbids physician self-referral, which is the referral of a patient to […]