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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery Television

An actual pro-vaccine storyline? On ABC?

I don’t watch Private Practice. I didn’t like Grey’s Anatomy, which, every time I caught part of it, struck me as the cheesiest sort of medical soap opera, a General Hospital transplanted to prime time. Given that Private Practice is a spinoff of Grey’s Anatomy, I never saw any reason whatsoever to watch. However, on […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine News of the Weird Quackery

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The revenge of semiotics

Three weeks ago, I reintroduced my readers to one of the most amazingly skilled weaver of woo tales who has ever lived. I’m referring, of course, to Lionel Milgrom, the man who can pepper his homeopathic woo with quantum nonsense the way Bobby Flay seasons his latest creation with various spices. Now, I’m about to […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

HIV/AIDS denialism, the Ministry of Truth, and the failure of memory holes in the Internet Age

One of my favorite novels of all time is George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. When it came to imagining the end to which totalitarianism could take us, no one before or since has written a more compelling book about living under such a regime. One aspect of Oceania, the fictional totalitarian state ruled […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

How not to do a study on the efficacy of “alternative” medicine

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last four years of examining the various forms of woo out there, it’s to be very, very skeptical whenever an advocate of a highly dubious-sounding “therapy” points to a study as “proof” that the therapy, whatever it is, works. Usually, what I find is a small pilot […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Movies Popular culture Quackery Television

$50 million for antivaccine madness?

Over the last year and a half, Jenny McCarthy has been, unfortunately, a fairly frequent topic of this blog. There is, of course, a reason for this. Ever since she published her first book on autism back in the summer of 2007, she has become the public face of the antivaccine movement and autism quackery. […]