Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Why don’t you rant about what I think you should rant about?

I’ve written before about how one of the favorite tactics of those who do not like my insistence on applying skepticism, science, and critical thinking to the claims of alternative medicine or my refusal to accept a dichotomy between “alternative” and “conventional” medicine is to try so smear me as some sort of “pharma shill.” […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Television

Is Bill Maher really that ignorant?

Work and a conference intervene to prevent a fresh dose of Respectful Insolence today. Fortunately, there’s still classic Insolence from the archives that hasn’t been moved over to the new blog. This one originally appeared on March 7, 2005. The short answer is: Yes. The long answer is below. When I first posted on this […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

On vaccines, immune to reason

It’s rare that one sees an editorial this spot on, but it happened a couple of days ago in The Washington Post: The debate over vaccine litigation has thus shifted from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt. While the number of major studies that have failed to find any substantive link between […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

Tactical air support against reiki in trauma

About a week ago, I wrote about how the wooiest of woo, reiki, has infiltrated one of the best academic trauma centers in the U.S. In it, I lamented that I was feeling increasingly alone in being disturbed by this infiltration of religious pseudoscience into bastions of scientific medicine. Fortunately for me, Dr. RW is […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The mercury militia silences a voice of reason

Today is a very sad day in the autism blogosphere. The news I am going to discuss saddens me and should sadden anyone concerned with autism, particularly in combating the antivaccination hysteria and the outright quackery that flows from it promulgated by so many these days, from J. B. Handley to Jenny McCarthy, who couldn’t […]