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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Earn CME credits for attending an autism quackfest!

Well, it snuck up on me again, the way it has a tendency to do every year. Maybe it’s because Memorial Day is so early this year. Maybe it’s because there’s just so much work to do this week given the multiple grant deadlines. Whatever the case, it just dawned on my last night that […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

One more bit of evidence burying the ex-hypothesis that vaccines cause autism

May I just say something again? (Actually, it’s my blog; so I’ll say it if I want to regardless of whether you want me to or not.) You know that “hypothesis” that vaccines cause autism, the one that has been at the core of the modern antivaccine movement over the last 15 years or so? […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine History Holocaust Medicine Quackery

The “Health Ranger” Mike Adams engages in legal thuggery against a critic

I hadn’t really planned on writing again about everyone’s favorite conspiracy theorist and promoter of quackery, Mike Adams, at least not so soon after the last time I did it, which was only last week after Adams appeared on Dr. Oz’s daytime television show to push his “laboratory.” Adams, as you might recall, goes by […]

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Announcements Blog housekeeping Blogging Medicine

Create your own Insolence!

As seems to happen more frequently, Orac has had his attention wholly taken up by contemplating a black hole. (Actually, he’s at a medical conference on quality care in breast cancer.) Consequently, after a four and a half hour drive to the hotel, dinner out with the conference staff, and preparing for his talk, he […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The director of NCCAM discovers Bayesian probability. Hilarity ensues.

Over the years, the criticism of “evidence-based medicine” (EBM) that I have repeated here and that I and others have repeated at my not-so-super-secret other blog is that its levels of evidence relegate basic science considerations to the lowest level evidence and elevate randomized clinical trial evidence to the highest rung, in essence fetishizing it […]