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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Flea talks reason, and the antivax hordes descend

Dr. Flea’s a guy after my own heart. He’s been blogging about vaccines, and now he’s getting into specific diseases. He’s posted an installment about the vaccine against Haemophilus influenza type B: The first American children to receive the Hib vaccine are turning 20 years old this year. Flea wasn’t practicing medicine in the pre-Hib […]

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Medicine

New vaccine blog

Well this looks interesting, a new blog by the author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver, Arthur Allen. Looks like something I may have to check out. Allen captures why various conditions like autism are so readily attributed by parents to vaccines: The history of vaccination is criss-crossed with controversies. The allegation […]

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Medicine Politics

A travesty of justice in Libya

I wish I could say that this was unexpected, but, given the politics and backwardness of Libya, it wasn’t. The Tripoli Six (a. k. a. the Benghazi Six) have been found guilty by a kangaroo court in Libya: A Libyan court has sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death for knowingly infecting […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

FAQ: Woo versus non-woo

I don’t think I could have done it much better, if at all. Dr. R.W. presents, in FAQ-form, a primer on the difference between woo and conventional medicine, even conventional modalities that are weakly grounded in evidence. A couple of examples: Many of mainstream medicine’s conventional treatments are not evidence based. Aren’t they a form […]

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Bioethics Medicine Religion

Separating doctoring from doctrine

You may recall how I’ve criticized the infiltration of woo into medical school and medical education in general. Such an infiltration threatens the scientific basis behind the hard-won success of so much of modern medicine over the last century. Unfortunately, woo isn’t the only threat to scientific medicine. Now, there is a growing movement that […]