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Medicine Politics Quackery Religion

Oregon: On the verge of stripping legal protection based on religion from parents who choose prayer instead of medicine

Over the years, I’ve said it many times. Competent adults have the right (or should have the right) to choose or refuse any medical treatment they wish for any reason. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous the reason might be. If a competent adult believes that magic water (i.e., homeopathy) can cure him of cancer, we […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

Ethics and the promotion of another anti-vaccine book

Here’s a chance for some skeptical activism if you happen to live in New York and its environs. It’s book promotion event for the most recent anti-vaccine propaganda piece, Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children by Louise Kuo Habakus and Mary Holland. […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Quackademic medicine at UCSF: The Osher Center for Integrative Medicine gets a new $37 million building

$37 million. If you were a medical school dean or a hospital administrator and had $37 million for a project, how woud you use it? What would you build? What would you renovate? What research projects would you fund? What infrastructure improvements would you make? Yes, $37 million is a lot of green. Back at […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

The resurrection of David Kirby as an anti-vaccine propagandist

Four days later, I still can’t figure it out. I really can’t. Remember the other day when I said I was debating whether or not to respond to the latest excretion from one of the first hangers-on of the anti-vaccine movement I ever encountered after I started blogging. I’m referring, of course, to freelance journalist […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A commenter takes me to task for being mean to Andrew Wakefield

It’s been pointed out to me that our old pal David Kirby, perhaps the cleverest antivaccine propagandist out there, is back at (where else?) The Huffington Post (a.k.a. HuffPo) asking why The Autism-Vaccine Debate: Why It Won’t Go Away (short answer: because opportunists like Kirby have teamed with believers in pseudoscience to keep fanning the […]