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Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The Food Babe is to food as Jenny McCarthy is to vaccines

I’ll admit it: I’m a bit of a beer snob. I make no bones about it, I like my beer, but I also like it to be good beer, and, let’s face it, beer brewed by large industrial breweries seldom fits the bill. To me, most of the beer out being sold in the U.S., […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

Chris beat cancer? He did indeed, but it wasn’t quackery that cured him

Chris Wark is a young man who was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer in 2003 at age 26. He underwent appropriate surgery for his cancer but declined adjuvant chemotherapy in favor of quackery. Now promotes his testimonial, in which he tries to convince people that it was the quackery, rather than the surgery, that cured him. He even claims that surgery alone can’t cure stage 3 colon cancer, which is just plain wrong. Yes, Chris beat cancer, but it was the surgery, not the quackery, that did it.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

A misguided “chalkboard talk”

Sometimes I feel like Dug, the talking dog in the movie Up, in that when it comes to blogging I’m often easily distracted. The reason I say this is because there’s been a “viral” (if you can call it that) video floating around the antivaccine quackery blogosphere that antivaccinationists are passing around as though it’s […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Exaggerating conflicts of interest to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vaccines

Remember Gayle DeLong? Last summer, DeLong published a paper in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, entitled A Positive Association found between Autism Prevalence and Childhood Vaccination uptake across the U.S. Population. As I pointed out at the time, it showed nothing of the sort. Besides botching the introduction by citing a panoply of […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

The “toxin gambit” on steroids

After having been saddened (and distracted, at least from a blog standpoint) by the death of Steve Jobs for the last few days, I think it’s time to get back to the normal sorts of stuff I blog about. Not that discussing medical issues related to celebrities in the news isn’t one of the normal […]