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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Quackery expands in the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

I’ve been writing about this topic so long—ever since the very beginning of this blog—that it seems as though I’ve always been doing it even though this blog has been in existence only 11 years and I didn’t really come to appreciate the problem until after I had started this blog. No, I’m not referring […]

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Clinical trials Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

What next for the randomized controlled clinical trial?

One of the most frequent complaints about evidence-based medicine (EBM), in contrast to science-based medicine (SBM), is its elevation of the randomized clinical trial as the be-all and end-all for clinical evidence for an intervention for a particular disease or condition. Unknown but enormous quantities of “digital ink” have been spilled explaining this distinction right […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

The MEND™ protocol for Alzheimer’s disease: Functional medicine on steroids? (revisited)

A week ago, I wrote about an example of one of the most common topics on this blog, the infiltration of pseudoscientific medicine and outright fantasy into academic medicine, a trend I like to refer to as quackademic medicine. The institution was George Washington University, and the dubious intervention was something called the MEND™ Protocol, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Popular culture Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Antivaxers lobbying Rep. Jason Chaffetz to investigate the CDC fawn over parents who let their child with bacterial meningitis die of medical neglect

Yesterday, I took note of a meeting of advocates and lawyers with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (OGR), which makes him a very powerful Congressman. The group that met with him included Del Bigtree, the producer of Andrew Wakefield’s antivaccine propagandafest of a “documentary” VAXXED: […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Antivaxers go to Washington to lobby Rep. Jason Chaffetz to investigate the CDC

I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine force. I had meant to write about it the other day, but other things intervened. Really, there’s so much pseudoscience out there at times that on some days it’s hard to decide what to tackle, and sometimes I feel as though I’m writing about vaccines too much. However, […]