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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media History Holocaust Holocaust denial Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

An antivaccine activist explains how she uses Facebook reporting algorithms to harass and silence pro-science bloggers

I wish this post were an April Fools Day joke, but it is not. Three weeks ago, Skeptical Raptor and I wrote posts describing how a particularly vicious, nasty antivaccine troll named Heather Murray had successfully gamed Facebook reporting algorithms intended to report abuse in order to silence pro-science bloggers. It is, unfortunately, a tactic […]

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

Tribeca Film Festival wrap-up: Andrew Wakefield’s “brilliance” and spies and Nazis, oh my!

Whenever a story like Robert De Niro’s decision to choose an antivaccine film by Andrew Wakefield for screening at his prestigious Tribeca Film Festival followed by his decision to drop the film like the proverbial hot potato upon being shown just how full of misinformation, distortions, and pseudoscience the film is shows up, I not […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies Popular culture Quackery

Mike Adams noticed that the Tribeca Film Festival has yanked Andrew Wakefield’s antivaccine film. Hilarity ensues.

I knew it wouldn’t take long. I just knew it. The moment I learned that Robert De Niro had reversed himself and decided to pull Andrew Wakefield’s dishonest antivaccine propaganda “documentary” from his Tribeca Film Festival after having admitted that he was the one who had greased the wheels to get it accepted for screening […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

No, cell phones are not “cooking men’s sperm”

I’ve written several times over the years about the overblown claims of harm attributed, largely—but not exclusively—by cranks, to cell phone radiation. It’s been claimed that radiation from cell phones can cause brain tumors (there’s no convincing evidence that this is true), breast cancer (the evidence for these claims is so incredibly flimsy—and featured by […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery

Stanislaw Burzynski in NEWSWEEK: How long can his “unprecedented medical malfeasance” continue?

I didn’t think I’d be writing about Stanislaw Burzynski again so soon, but to my surprise a very good article in Newsweek describing cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski popped up in my Google Alerts yesterday. I hadn’t expected much in the way of news coverage about Burzynski for several months, given that the second half of […]