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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Politics Quackery

Naturopaths vie for Medicare reimbursement with a dubious survey

Naturopathy is a pseudodiscipline that resembles a Chinese menu of quackery, in which naturopaths select one from column A and two from column B, with each column containing a list of modalities ranging from pure quackery like homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine to mundane modalities that naturopaths embrace, “rebrand” as “alternative,” and woo-ify and oversell […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Criticism of pseudoscience and quackery is not "hate speech"

I sense a new disturbance in the antivaccine force. I hadn’t planned on blogging about the antivaccine movement again, but I felt that I needed to do a follow up to yesterday’s (hopefully) amusing little takedown of the antivaccine stylings of new member of that group personification of the Dunning-Kruger effect and arrogance of ignorance, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

An antivaccine “Thinker” calls for a boycott

There is a perception that strikes me as common enough to be considered “common wisdom” that antivaccine views are much more common on the “left” of the political spectrum than they are on the “right.” I’ve discussed on multiple occasions how this perceived common wisdom is almost certainly wrong, or at least so incomplete as […]

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

Bill and Hillary Clinton embrace the quackery that is functional medicine

This might look somewhat familiar to people, but I have a good excuse. Yesterday was Easter, and, although by no stretch of the imagination can I be accused of being particularly religious, we still did have family to visit. Add to that the fact that I have a two talks to give today that as […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Ad hominem and harassment: How antivaccine activists work

For some reason, I was really beat last night, and, given that this weekend is a holiday for a large proportion of the country (if, perhaps, not for a large proportion of my readership), I don’t feel too bad about slacking off a bit by mentioning a couple of short bits that I wanted to […]