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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

If you can’t get justice one way, maybe justice will come another way

Actions have consequences, as do beliefs. For example, the widespread erroneous belief among many parents of autistic children that the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was used in most childhood vaccines until 2002 somehow caused autism in their children have led some pseudoscientists and parents who have fallen under their sway to subject their […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Andrew Wakefield: The Galileo Gambit writ large in The Observer

I just don’t understand it. I just don’t understand how anyone can take discredited antivaccination loon Andrew Wakefield seriously anymore. In particular, I don’t understand how any reputable newspaper can actually take him seriously anymore, given how thoroughly he and his “work” have been discredited. First came the news in late December that at the […]

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History Medicine

Before paging systems…

Given that my electronic leash is always with me and that ubiquitous pagers and cell phones make doctors reachable 24 hours a day, it’s amazing to contemplate a time when a PA system at a hospital was considered new and high tech: I especially like the part touting the volume control, as if that were […]

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Bioethics Computers and social media Medicine News of the Weird Quackery

Scariest spam I’ve ever received…

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently perused all the e-mails that Gmail had flagged as spam and to my dismay found a lot of legitimate e-mail, including mailing list e-mails and Movable Type e-mails notifying me of comments being caught up in the filter. However, I found something scarier than that. In fact, I found […]

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Medicine Politics Religion

More on doctors and terrorism

The other day, I wrote about how several of the suspects arrested in the attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow were physicians or in training to be physicians. At the time, I expressed dismay at what I viewed to be a betrayal of the very basis of our profession, that we try to help […]