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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Suppression of speech through legal intimidation, anti-vaccine edition: Barbara Loe Fisher sues Dr. Paul Offit, Amy Wallace, and Condé Nast for libel

In general, one of the biggest differences between those defending science-based medicine and those defending pseudoscience, quackery, and anti-science is that science inculcates in its adherents a culture of free and open debate. In marked contrast, those advocating pseudoscience tend to cultivate cultures of the echo chamber. Examples abound and include discussion forums devoted to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

One possible reason why Barbara Loe Fisher chose to sue Paul Offit in Virginia?

After yesterday’s post about how anti-vaccine grande dame Barbara Loe Fisher is suing Dr. Paul Offit, almost certainly in order to harass and intimidate him into silence, there was something that still bugs me, and that’s the issue of jurisdiction. The defendants live in three different states: Paul Offit in Pennsylvania, Amy Wallace in California, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The price exacted by the anti-vaccine movement

As 2009 ended and 2010 began, I made a vow to myself to try to diversify the topics covered on this blog. Part of that vow was to try to avoid writing about vaccines and the anti-vaccine movement for more than a couple of days in a row. Unfortunately, even in the middle its very […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

Barbara Loe Fisher: Hypocritical, not “fearless”

I’ve been criticizing the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, for her cowardly attempt to shut up vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit and to intimidate journalists into not writing exposes of the anti-vaccine movement by suing Dr. Offit, Amy Wallace, and WIRED Magazine for Wallace’s excellent article in which Dr. Offit was […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Making legal threats against a blogging cancer patient? Stay classy, Shayla McCallum and Dr. Thomas Lodi. Stay classy.

I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it more times than I can remember. Purveyors of unscientific medicine don’t have the goods. If they had the goods, then their nostrums wouldn’t be called “alternative” medicine anymore; they’d just be medicine. Because they don’t have the goods in the form of science and clinical evidence, all […]