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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

As 2013 draws to a close in the skeptical world…

As I write this, 2013 is drawing to a close, with only a little more than 12 hours to go before the crowds now gathering at Times Square and elsewhere ring in 2014. For some of you, 2014 has already arrived or will arrive many hours before it does for me. I’m not normally one […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

In which Mike Adams gives Orac an unintended Christmas present

It’s Christmas Eve, and the blogging is light. I was going to have some fun with a truly ridiculous—is there ever any other kind?—segment on Dr. Oz’s show in which he actually combined a quack and a psychic with some EEGs to become a “100% believer” in psychic scammer “Long Island Medium” Theresa Caputo. However, […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

Sarah Hershberger comes home to die

It was a couple of weeks ago that I last provided an update on the case of Sarah Hershberger, the 11-year-old Amish girl from Medina County, Ohio with lymphoblastic lymphoma whose parents decided to stop her chemotherapy because of how sick it was making her. As I explained early on and on multiple occasions afterward, […]

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Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking Sports

When false hope leads well-meaning people astray

One of the frequent topics on this blog is, unsurprisingly, cancer quackery. Be it the Gerson therapy and its propensity for encouraging patients to take hundreds of supplements and to shoot copious amounts of coffee where it really doesn’t belong (where the sun don’t shine), the Gonzalez protocol, homeopathy, naturopathy, or various other nonsensical and […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Quackery

Why are antivaccinationists so at home with Libertarianism?

Rats. Everyone’s blogging about all the studies showing (as if it needed to be shown yet again) that vitamin supplementation is not necessary for most people, nor does it decrease the risk of heart disease or cancer, and I can’t, at least not yet. Why not? Because my friggin’ university doesn’t subscribe to the Annals […]