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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Fundraising for antivaccine research

If there’s one thing that antivaccine cranks tell us that has a grain of truth in it, it’s to be wary of pharmaceutical companies and their influence. Their mission is, of course, to make profits, and sometimes the search for profits can lead them to do things that are less than savory. Of course, antivaccine […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

H1N1 vaccine and miscarriages: More dumpster diving in the VAERS database

Antivaccinationists just love the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting (VAERS) database. As in love it to death. As in “can’t get enough of it.” The reason, of course, is that VAERS is a lot like an unmoderated discussion forum or, at best, a minimally moderated forum. Anyone can say anything they like. The reason is that […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

Quackademic medicine involving reflexology

Reflexology is quackery. It’s based on magical thinking that views every major organ in the body as somehow mappable to specific points on the soles of the feet or the palms of the hands and posits that somehow massaging these areas can have therapeutic effects on the organs in question. Claims regularly made for reflexology […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

Stanislaw Burzynski gets off on a technicality

NOTE: Special thanks to Jann Bellamy for advising me regarding the legal aspects of this post. There are times when I fear that I’m writing about the same topic too many times in too brief a period of time. Most commonly, I notice this concern when writing about the lunacy of the anti-vaccine movement. In […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Quackery

Representative Dan Burton’s last antivaccine hurrah is scheduled for November 29

Whenever I blog about atrocities against science like the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I’m frequently asked how just such an edifice designed to promote pseudoscience could have come to be as a full-fledged center in the National Institutes of Health. The answer is simple and boils down to woo-loving legislators. In […]