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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine

The fundamental intellectual dishonesty of Eric Merola and his promotion of Stanislaw Burzynski

About a month ago, Eric Merola screened his second movie about “brave maverick doctor” Stanislaw Burzynski, Burzynski: Cancer Is A Serious Business, Part 2 (henceforth referred to as “Burzynski II”), a screening that Brian Thompson and an unnamed colleague from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) attended, took notes, and even managed to ask a […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine

Professor Stephen Bustin schools Andrew Wakefield, and I enjoy

I suppose that while I’m on another roll writing about the antivaccine movement I should just embrace it. I was going to start this post out again with one of my periodic laments about how blogging about the antivaccine movement has taken over and crowded out other topics that I like to write about. I […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

And now Anne Frank is dragged into the antivaccine picture

I guess that the antivaccinationists didn’t listen to me last time when I suggested that maybe—just maybe—using Holocaust analogies when discussing autism and vaccines is just a wee bit inappropriate, such an overblown analogy that it spreads far more heat than light. At least, Kent Heckenlively didn’t, and, because his invocation of the Nazi card […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

In which Orac gets even more “shrill and brutish” about chelation therapy and TACT

If there’s one thing that a certain subset of people who view themselves as reasonable and science-based don’t like, it’s harshness: Harshness in criticism, harshness in discussion, or—horror of horrors!—anything they view as “incivility.” That’s all well and good as far as it goes, but the problem is that sometimes there are things that demand […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine

The “I told you so” fantasy, or: The fallacy of future vindication

Cranks love to fantasize that their ideas will be vindicated in the future. The fantasy almost never becomes reality.