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Announcements Medicine Music

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and Happy New Year

To all those who come here regularly for a dose of Insolence, Respectful or otherwise, skepticism and science, best holiday wishes for whatever end-of-year holidays you might celebrate. I’ll probably be on a less intensive blogging schedule until after the New Year, depending on things go (sometimes, even between Christmas and New Years, something happens […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Does combatting quackery and pseudoscience through rational argument and ridicule work?

As hard as it is to believe, I’ve been at this blogging thing for 12 years now. In fact, it’s been so long that this year I didn’t even remember to mention it when it happened nearly two weeks ago. Over that time period, I’ve dealt with a large number of conspiracy theories. Indeed, skeptics […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

The crank medical organization to which HHS nominee Dr. Tom Price belongs lays down a heaping helping of antivaccine pseudoscience

Dr. Tom Price, nominee for HHS Secretary, belongs to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which just laid down a heaping helping of antivaccine pseudoscience.

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

This could be the most ludicrous version of the “toxins” gambit I’ve ever seen

One of the oldest antivaccine tropes that first encountered is one that I like to call the “toxins gambit.” Basically, this is an antivaccine lie that portrays vaccines as being laden with all manner of “toxins” because they have—gasp!—chemicals with scary sounding names and even some chemicals that are toxic. The lie derives from the […]

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

Does thinking make it so? The placebo myth rears its ugly head again.

Blogging is a funny thing. Sometimes the coincidence involved is epic. For instance, as I do on many Mondays, yesterday I crossposted a modified and updated version of a post from a week ago from my not-so-super-secret other blog. This time around, it just so happened to be a post about what I like to […]