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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Late night ads to make you poop

It’s very bad when I have a week off. Very, very bad. The reason is that when I have a week off I have this rather unfortunate tendency to stay up late at night, and when I stay up late at night I have an even more unfortunate tendency to check out late night infomercials […]

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Medicine Politics Surgery

An update on UCSC animal rights terrorism

In the two days since I first mentioned an attempted home invasion of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) by bandana-masked animal rights terrorists, there have been new developments worth posting an update here. First, last night the Santa Cruz Sentinel posted a story indicating that the FBI are now involved […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

David Kirby and the government “concession that vaccines cause autism”: The incredible shrinking causation claim

I didn’t want to blog about this. I really didn’t. No, the reason why I didn’t want to blog about this latest screed by mercury militia enabler David Kirby is not because it is about any sort of slam-dunk proof that vaccines do after all cause autism, a mistaken impression that you might get if […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

The consequences of not vaccinating

In case you haven’t heard it enough on this blog and elsewhere: Antivaccination lunacy has consquences. In the UK, measles cases have jumped to a record high: The number of measles cases in England and Wales jumped more than 30% last year to the highest level since records began in 1995. The Health Protection Agency […]

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Clinical trials Medicine

Do cell phones make men sterile?

A few days ago, I came across an article on Engadget that mentioned almost in passing some studies that seemed to indicate health problems or no health problems, depending on the specific study, due to the ubiquitous and maligned cellular telephone. Not having dealt with this issue much on my blog, I decided to take […]