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Announcements Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Welcome to the Age of Ignorance

Everyone knows that the quackery-friendly, antivaccine blog Age of Autism has a rather–shall we say?–hypocritical stance when it comes to free speech. For one thing, for all their complaints about censorship and not being heard by the government, its denizens frequently confuse freedom of speech with freedom from criticism. For another thing, they also ruthlessly […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

That’ll teach ’em for using an actual valid placebo control

I almost feel sorry for acupuncturists these days. Almost. Well, not exactly. Clearly, given the infiltration of woo into academic medicine, acupuncturists are in demand even in the most allegedly “science-based” of academic medical centers. After all, acupuncture is what I like to refer to as “gateway woo,” an unscientific placebo-based therapy that has somehow […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

Say it ain’t so, Barack! Again.

I realize that I made perhaps the biggest splash I’ve made on this blog in a very, very long time when I wrote about the news reports and rumors that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was being seriously considered for a high ranking post in the new Obama Administration. Fortunately, this is not yet another post […]

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Bioethics Medicine Religion

Brain death and fundamentalist religion, revisited

Yesterday, I wrote about the sad case of Motl Brody, a 12-year-old Orthodox Jew whose brain tumor had rendered him brain dead and whose parents are fighting the efforts of the hospital to disconnect him from the ventilator and to stop all the powerful cardiac drugs that are keeping his heart beating and his blood […]

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Biology Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Movies Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The (not-so-)Beautiful (un)Truth: The “alternative” medicine movement gets an Expelled! to call its very own

The things I do for my readers. I’m referring to a movie entitled The Beautiful Truth, links to whose website and trailers several of you have e-mailed to me over the last couple of weeks. Maybe it’s because the movie is only showing in New York and Los Angeles and hasn’t made it out of […]