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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking Television

Dr. Oz’s evolution as America’s foremost promoter of quackery continues apace

I’ve often written of “black holes of stupid” that threaten to rupture the fabric of the space-time continuum, so dense and full of stupid are they. Such black holes tend to come from places like the wretched hive of scum and antivaccine quackery known as Age of Autism, the wretched hive of scum and conspiracy […]

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Announcements Medicine Science fiction/fantasy Television

While Orac is otherwise busy trying to keep his lab funded, meet Orac

Grant deadlines strike again, and there’s no new Insolence for you to peruse today. (The problem with doing real science, as opposed to blogging, is that you actually have to apply endlessly for grant money, and, believe it or not, that comes first, before even Insolence.) Fortunately, I’ve been made aware of an endless source […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Television

A counterpoint to Jenny McCarthy’s autism narrative

There was a time when I used to blog about Jenny McCarthy a lot. The reason, of course, is that a few years ago, beginning in around 2007, she seized the title of face of the antivaccine movement in America through her “advocacy” for her son Evan, whom she described as having been made autistic […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Television

I love the smell of the pharma shill gambit in the morning. It smells like…crankery.

I promised myself that I was done writing about Jenny McCarthy this week. Two posts, a lengthy one and a brief one, lamenting her being hired for a national daytime talk show was, in my view, enough. Unfortunately, something’s happened that makes me want to make like Arnold Schwarzenegger in that famous scene from the […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Television

Sometimes the mainstream press actually gets it (mostly) right about vaccines

Sometimes, the mainstream press gets it (mostly) right, and Jake Tapper actually got it right in a report on CNN yesterday about Jenny McCarthy’s having been hired by ABC as a regular on The View. Although I don’t like how Jake Tapper describes Generation Rescue as an “autism organization” (it is clearly an antivaccine group), […]