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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

Now there’s a cage match I’d like to see when I get back from Chicago…

…Mark Crislip versus Doug Bremner. Dr. Crislip calmly explains the evidence regarding flu vaccination and why it’s safe and effective. Perhaps the most important point there is this: So it’s a suboptimal vaccine. And that’s a problem. One, because it will make it more difficult to prove efficacy in clinical studies and two, there is […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Quackery

The 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award (a.k.a Bill Maher) “doesn’t believe in” vaccines or “Western medicine”

No màs! No màs! I surrender! I give up! I tried. I really, really did try. I tried really, really hard not to look at the flaming idiocy of Bill Maher again, much less comment on it again. Here I am, in Chicago at the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, taking in all sorts […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

When you dismiss every scientific study, you open the door to believing anything

I’m back. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in the nearly five years that I’ve been doing this blog thing, it’s that getting started again after taking even a few days off is hard. There’s a bit of paralysis that sets in. I get used to not having to think about what I want to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Vaccination for H1N1 “swine” flu: Do The Atlantic, Shannon Brownlee, and Jeanne Lenzer matter?

I had meant to address this topic last week, but the whole Suzanne Somers thing bubbled up and overwhelmed my blogging attention. Regular readers of this blog probably realize that I tend to live and die as a blogger by the maxim that if some is good more must be better. So I clobbered the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Anti-vaccine activism, not autism activism, part 2

You know, when Age of Autism starts announcing its yearly “people of the year” awards, there’s always a lot of blog fodder there to be had. Given that this is the time of year when I ramp the blog down a bit and, trying to relax a little, don’t spend as much time doing detailed […]