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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Entertainment/culture Medicine Popular culture Quackery Television

Jenny McCarthy shows off her intellect

I know, I know it seems like the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel, but some creature that I can’t identify is having a fight somewhere in the neighborhood, freaking out my dog, and now I can’t go back to sleep; so why not blog? In any case, I found out last week that Jenny […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A cancer quackery I had never heard of before?

After having blogged about cancer quackery for more than four years and having spent at least five years before that on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative seeing virtually all manner of quackery, cancer and otherwise, I thought I had seen it all. Indeed, I thought that there was no form of cancer quackery that I hadn’t […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The hypocrisy of anti-vaccine activists

If there’s one thing about the anti-vaccine movement in general and one of its chief mouthpieces for propaganda, the Age of Autism blog, in particular, it’s rank hypocrisy. One of the key tenets of anti-vaccine ideology is an unrelenting distrust of big pharma. While that in and of itself would not be entirely unreasonable, given […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Biology Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Melanie Phillips: Crank magnetism in action on evolution and vaccines

A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Quackery

Whoa. Could it be? An actual science-based article at The Huffington Post?

Pinch me. I must be dreaming. I say that because I actually see an article in The Huffington Post in which the blogger, Jacob Dickerman, actually correctly describes why homeopathy is quackery! For instance: Homeopaths will tell us that water has a memory. That it vibrates in a certain way and thus knows exactly what […]