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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Who knew? Tightening up requirements for waivers for school vaccine requirements increases vaccine uptake!

Michigan is a frustrating state to live in these days. Our state government has just shown itself to be epically incompetent in its handling of the Flint water crisis, which I’ve written about a couple of times before. Our legislature repealed our mandatory motorcycle helmet law, and as a result in this state motorcycles are […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Ben Swann’s long-awaited report on the “CDC whistleblower” goes over like a lead balloon of antivaccine misinformation

Ben Swann, anchor of the evening news for the local Atlanta CBS affiliate and the face of his Truth In Media series of videos, thinks himself an investigative journalist and a truth teller, but much of what I see him reporting more closely resembles reporting as though done by a cross between Ted Baxter, Ron […]

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Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking Surgery

Repealing motorcycle helmet laws: Making motorcycles even more into donorcycles

It’s a seldom mentioned aspect of my professional history that I used to do a lot of trauma surgery in my youth. I did my residency at a program that included a county hospital with a busy trauma program where I saw quite a bit of vehicular carnage and an urban hospital (which has since […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine History Medicine Politics Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Makayla Sault’s mother: Racism, trust, and science-based medicine

One of the recurring topics I write about is, of course, cancer quackery. It goes right back to the very beginning of this blog, to my very earliest posts more than 11 years ago. Over the years I’ve covered more cases than I can remember of patients relying on quackery instead of real medicine. In […]

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Medicine Politics Popular culture Science Skepticism/critical thinking

“Transparency” should not equal a license to harass scientists

Kevin Folta was subject to an abusive FOIA request for his emails by US Right To Know, an anti-GMO group seeking to harass him for his advocacy for GMOs. Paul Thacker, a journalist, used those emails without pointing out the true nature of the source of the FOIA request, and has argued for an expansive view of FOIA that is basically a license for groups like USTRK to harass scientists.