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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Sepsis is not caused by bacterial infection?

Sometimes I come across something so bizarre, so utterly wrong, that my mind reels in confusion and amazement, not to mention horror, that anyone can actually think or write something something like it. In fact, for a moment I considered offering up this one bit of horrifically inspired craziness up as an installment of Your […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Can we?

I think my title says it all: Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Can we? The reason I ask this question is because yet another large meta-analysis has been released that is entirely consistent with the hypothesis that acupuncture is a placebo. Because I’ve written about so […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

I love the smell of blog napalm in the morning…

…it smells like…fisking. In this case, it’s a fisking of a particularly annoyingly self-righteous and scientifically ignorant antivaccinationist by a medical student. The annoying drinker of the “vaccines cause autism” Kool Aid is Ginger Taylor. The medical student is Adina Cappell. The slapdown is utterly comprehensive, methodical, and ruthless, pummeling Ginger’s panoply of pseudoscience, logical […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The first of (I hope) many very bad days for antivaccinationists in 2009

It looks like I’ve been sucked into another streak again. Regular readers know that examining the claims of the antivaccine movement with skepticism, science, and critical thinking has been a theme of this blog from the very beginning. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last four years, it’s that vaccine news seems to […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Sometimes, justice does find quacks

Remember the quack-friendly scammer Kevin Trudeau? Remember his book Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You To Know About? Back during the summer, he was fined $5 million and ordered not to produce or publish infomercials for products in which he had an interest. Given the huge profits he made from Natural Cures and his followup […]