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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Politics Popular culture Quackery

Medical marijuana for autism and autism biomed quackery: One in the same and on the verge of approval in Michigan

When I first started writing about the claims made for medical marijuana and the cannabis oil derived from it, it didn’t take long for me to characterize medical claims for cannabis as the “new herbalism,” as opposed to pharmacognosy, the branch of pharmacology devoted to the study of natural products. The reason is simple. Although […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

On teaching pseudoscientific controversies in universities…

About a month ago, a number of news stories were published reporting that the University of Toronto had offered a course in alternative medicine taught by a homeopath named Beth Laundau-Halpern that presented a segment that was clearly highly biased towards antivaccine pseudoscience. It was worse than that, though, because this homeopathy just happened to […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

A portrait of quackademia triumphant: Georgetown University

I frequently discuss a disturbing phenomenon known as “quackademic medicine.” Basically, quackademic medicine is a phenomenon that has taken hold over the last two decades in medical academia in which once ostensibly science-based medical schools and academic medical centers embrace quackery. This embrace was once called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) but among quackademics the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

The return of the revenge of the “CDC whistleblower”

A couple of weeks ago, I first took note of a new conspiracy theory that’s been brewing in the antivaccine crankosphere, namely the claim that big pharma has been systematically murdering alternative medical doctors, starting with autism quack Jeff Bradstreet, who committed suicide the day after the FDA raided his office. Of course, it didn’t […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery

Another unnecessary death in the making, thanks to cancer quackery

I hate stories like this, but what I hate even more is the way stories like this are all too commonly reported. Readers have been sending me links to stories about a woman named Alex Wynn that have been published over the last few days, in particular this story about her in the Daily Mail […]