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Medicine Quackery

Battling quackery in “conventional” medicine

Grant crunch time again yesterday. That means it’s the perfect time once again to dig up something from the archives of old blog and repost it here. This particular piece originally appeared on January 12, 2005, just shy of one month after I started blogging. I’m guessing once again that, because not many people were […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Understanding alternative medicine “testimonials” for cancer cures

NOTE: I had been thinking about how to migrate my old posts from the old blog over to ScienceBlogs, and came up with an idea. Whenever “real life” intrudes on my blogging–as it has now, thanks to two different grant applications that ate up my entire weekend that prevented me from coming up with the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Medical wiki revisited

Last week, I wrote a rather lengthy (or, as my detractors would probably call it, “long-winded”) post about the concept of a medical wikipedia. As you may recall, I expressed considerable skepticism about whether the wikipedia concept could work as well as its boosters claim it could. Even though others have clarified what a medical […]

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Autism Medicine Quackery

Vox responds

A few days ago, I fisked the antivaccination posturings of a certain “Libertarian Christian commenator” regarding the Geiers’ claim that mercury in the thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is a major cause of autism. Many of the comments predicted that Vox wouldn’t respond. (Personally, I was hoping that he would but, based on […]

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Autism Medicine Quackery Religion

More Scientology madness

With all the nuttiness coming out of Tom Cruise in the name of Scientology, it’s often forgotten that there are a lot of other Scientologists out there in Hollywood. One of the other most prominent ones is John Travolta. Compared to Tom Cruise, John Travolta seems, superficially at least, the height of reason. Certainly he’s […]