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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

John McCain panders to antivaccination zealots

Well, now I’m really in a pickle as far as the 2008 Presidential election goes. I really don’t like Hillary Clinton and consider Barack Obama not ready for prime time; i.e., he’s too inexperienced and too liberal for my liking. On the other hand, I used to like John McCain–at least until he started pandering […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Me and Sue Young Homeopathy on the same list? I need a beer to drown my sorrows…

Earlier today I was perusing incoming links. (Yes, most bloggers do that because we like to know who’s linking to us; any blogger who doesn’t do this from time to time is atypical or lying about it.) What to my wondering (and I do mean wondering) eyes should appear, but Respectful Insolence appearing on a […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

David Kirby and the government “concession that vaccines cause autism”: The incredible shrinking causation claim

I didn’t want to blog about this. I really didn’t. No, the reason why I didn’t want to blog about this latest screed by mercury militia enabler David Kirby is not because it is about any sort of slam-dunk proof that vaccines do after all cause autism, a mistaken impression that you might get if […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

The consequences of not vaccinating

In case you haven’t heard it enough on this blog and elsewhere: Antivaccination lunacy has consquences. In the UK, measles cases have jumped to a record high: The number of measles cases in England and Wales jumped more than 30% last year to the highest level since records began in 1995. The Health Protection Agency […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Quackery

AutismOne: A “Warrior Mother” and pseudoscience

One way that pseudoscience tries to maintain a patina of respectability to the outside world, a patina that sometimes even manages to take in researchers unacquainted with its methods, is through the “research conference” that has all the trappings of a research meeting but whose topics reveal the pseudoscience at the heart of it all. […]