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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Television

Adventures in bad veterinary medicine reported by the local media

We skeptical bloggers try our best to educate our readers about science and critical thinking, in the process explaining why various forms of pseudoscience, quackery, and cranker are, well, pseudoscience, quackery, and crankery. Unfortunately, even the most heavy duty, high traffic skeptical blogs don’t have anywhere near the reach of the mass media, in particular […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“I don’t make assumptions” about vaccines and people’s motives

Every so often, I like to try to get into the mind of an antivaccine crank, a quack, or crank of another variety, because understanding what makes cranks tick (at least, as much as I can given that I’m not one) can be potentially very useful in my work trying to counter them. On the […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Naturopathy Quackery

Do you believe in magic in medicine?

Sometimes, between blogging, a demanding day (and night) job doing surgery and science, and everything else, I embarrass myself. Sure, sometimes I embarrass myself by saying something that, in retrospect, I wish I hadn’t. More often, I embarrass myself by letting things slide that I shouldn’t. For instance, when friends send me a prepublication copy […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

No matter how often I read about treatments like this, I still can’t believe parents actually subject their children to them

It’s been a while since I’ve written about MMS. You remember MMS, don’t you? It’s an abbreviation for “miracle mineral solution,” a solution first promoted by a man who is inaptly named Jim Humble. Basically, as I’ve described in multiple blog posts, MMS is bleach, specifically chlorine dioxide (ClO2). I first became acutely aware of […]

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Biology Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Bad science about GMOs: It reminds me of the antivaccine movement (revisited)

I never used to write much about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) before. I still don’t do it that often. For whatever reason, it just hasn’t been on my radar very much. That seems to be changing, however. It’s not because I went seeking this issue out (although I must admit that I first became interested […]