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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

Deaths from vaccines in Japan?

Confusing correlation with causation. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. These are two of the most common errors human beings make. Indeed, they’re natural errors that our brains appear hard-wired to make, and, without scientific training, it’s virtually impossible to avoid making the conclusion that, because two occurrences correlate with each other they must be related […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

For the anti-vaccinationists out there: The results of a real “vaxed versus unvaxed” study

In many ways, the anti-vaccine movement is highly mutable. However, this mutability is firmly based around keeping one thing utterly constant, and that one thing is vaccines. No matter what the evidence, no matter what the science, no matter how much observational, scientific, and epidemiological evidence is arrayed against them, to the relentlessly self-confident members […]

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Entertainment/culture History Humor Movies Popular culture World War II

Grammar Nazis

Sometimes I complain on this blog about grammar Nazis. I had no idea at the time that grammar Nazis might actually be a real phenomenon. Of course, I’d be dead because my unedited material all too frequently contains multiple run-on sentences. True, I almost always find them later when I reread my posts and then […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Mercury and autism: More Huffington Post nonsense

The whole post-Christmas thing left me without time to do anything other than a couple of brief bits. Consequently, given Deirdre Imus’ two recent appearances on the Huffington Post, I thought it would be as good a time as any to resurrect this post from June 27, 2005. For those of you who haven’t been […]

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Medicine Pseudoscience Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

Deepak Chopra misunderstands skepticism

Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction–I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these […]