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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

Would you like some whine with that cheese, Ms. Fisher?

I must admit, I’m surprised that it took so long for this to happen. Remember back in April? Three months ago, uber-quack (in my opinion) Joe Mercola teamed up with the grand dame of the anti-vaccine movement Barbara Loe Fisher of the misnamed National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) to run a “public service announcement” on […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Consumer Reports and credulity towards alternative medicine

Et tu, Consumer Reports? Since I was a teenager, I’ve intermittently read Consumer Reports, relying on it for guidance in all manner of purchase decisions. CR has been known for rigorous testing of all manner of consumer products and the rating of various services, arriving at its rankings through a systematic testing method that, while […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

What is Generation Rescue selling now?

Oh, geez. You might have noticed that I haven’t written much about Jenny McCarthy in a while. The reason is fairly obvious. She seems to have faded into the background as far as her previous promotion of a vaccine-autism link. Three years ago, she was leading marches on Washington in which anti-vaccine activists claiming not […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

“SmartVax”: The Orwellian repackaging of old anti-vaccine tropes

It appears that while TAM9 was dominating all my extracurricular, non-job-related attention, with my having to get ready to give a talk, I failed to notice another thing besides the placebo/asthma paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine last Thursday. But fear not. If it’s important (to me, at least, and hopefully to […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science

Dangerous placebo medicine for asthma

Note: I just got back from TAM; so if you happened to see a different version of this post somewhere else, now you know why. Last week while I was at TAM, a study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). It is another beautiful example of how proponents of complementary and alternative […]