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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Quackery Surgery

An autistic child pays the price for Andrew Wakefield’s antivaccination “research”

Andrew Wakefield is an incompetent “scientist.” Of that, there is no longer any doubt whatsoever, given how poorly he and his collaborators did the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) studies that he did looking for measles RNA sequences in colon biopsy specimens taken from autistic children, studies in which they failed to do even the most […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Saturday afternoon lazy troll feeding

See what happens when I actually manage to keep myself from checking my blog for nearly 24 whole hours? The trolls take over. Well, they’re not exactly trolls. Trolls often don’t believe in what they post; they merely post it to get a reaction, for example, like rabid Hillary Clinton opponents posting on pro-Clinton discussion […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Schadenfreude

Sorry, but I can’t help but feel a bit of schadenfreude over this. Chelationist extraordinaire Dr. Rashid Buttar is, it would appear, in a bit of trouble: A Huntersville doctor is facing charges of unprofessional conduct. Dr. Rashid Buttar’s alternative medicine clinic treats autism patients from the around the country, but tonight there are questions […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Another reason why homeopathy still persists?

A few weeks ago, Martin over at Aardvarchaelogy, Steve Novella, and I speculated about how alternative medicine modalities might evolve and what the selection pressures on them might be. We all agreed that, to some degree, there is definite selection pressure for remedies that do no harm but that also do no objective good either. […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Bouncing away the toxins

After last week’s Your Friday Dose of Woo, which featured an amazingly extravagant bit of woo that took up 10,000 webpages of some of most densely-packed woo language that I’ve ever seen, I feel the need for a change of pace. It’s time to simplify this week. After all, if I were to do nothing […]