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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Quackery

Science is quite safe from your pitiful little band…

I’m having a hard time keeping myself from laughing uproariously. I’m talking gut-wrenching belly laughs, the kind that are so intense that you have trouble catching your breath between paroxysms of laughter, the kind that threaten to force the contents of your stomach to go the wrong way, up and out. What, you may ask, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

The problem of nonmedical exemptions from school vaccine mandates is getting worse

It’s feast or famine in the ol’ blogging world, and right now it’s such a feast that I can’t decide what to blog about. For instance, there are at least two studies and a letter that I wouldn’t mind blogging about just in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine alone. Then […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism

Fear and loathing and vaccines

As hard as it is for me to believe when I look back at it, I’ve been writing about the antivaccine movement now for more than seven years here on this blog and combatting it online for at least a decade now. I like to think that over the years my response has evolved somewhat. […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine

Respecting parental concerns versus pandering to antivaccine fears

In common colloquial usage, there is a term known as “gaydar.” Basically, it’s the ability some people claim to have that allows them to identify people who are gay. Whether gaydar actually exists or not, I don’t know, but I claim to have an ability that’s similar. That ability is the ability to sniff out […]

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Autism Clinical trials

Is a trial of stem cell therapy in autism scientifically and ethically justified?

Houston, we have a problem. Oh, wait. I’m not talking about Stanislaw Burzynski this time. But we do still have a problem, and it’s a problem that resembles the Burzynski problem I recently discussed. Specifically, it’s a problem of unethical clinical trials somehow winning approval from institutional review boards (IRBs). In academia, IRBs are basically […]