Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Acupuncturists mistake insufficient rigor for bias against them

Acupuncturists complain that the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommends treatments for knee osteoarthritis for which the evidence is weak. They think that means that NICE should also accept acupuncture. In reality, it means that NICE should stop recommending treatments without support by strong scientific evidence.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The Somali measles outbreak in Minnesota: Thanks again, Andy (and American antivaxers), for the measles

Antivaxers targeted a. vulnerable community of Somali immigrants in Minnesota. The result: A large (and growing) measles outbreak. Thanks, Andy.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

A boatload of fail: Were two horrendously bad zombie “vaxed/antivaxed” studies retracted—again?

Yesterday, Orac made a rare oversight. He missed an antivaccine study that’s risen from the dead once again after having been retracted. He is more than happy to correct that oversight here and now by applying some Insolence to the second study as well and to express amusement that it appears that both studies have been retracted yet again.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Thanks for the measles yet again, Andy: Antivax vultures swoop in to spread misinformation among the Minnesota Somali immigrant community

Antivaccine activists have been targeting the community of Somali immigrants in Minnesota for over a decade now, with devastating results. In the midst of a growing measles outbreak, antivaxers have descended upon the community to keep promoting antivaccine quackery.

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

It’s full steam ahead for cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski

Since being given a slap on the wrist by the Texas Medical Board for his many years of peddling his antineoplastons, a treatment that’s never been shown to have significant anticancer activity, Stanislaw Burzynski is back in action again, preying on desperate cancer patients like it’s 1999.