Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Still more evidence that Morgellons disease is most likely delusional parasitosis

One of the stranger Internet-based quackery phenomena of the last decade is Morgellon’s disease. This is a topic I haven’t visited that much on this blog, its having last come up in a big way a little more than a year ago, when I discussed it in the context of Dr. Rolando Arafiles and the […]

Categories
Biology Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science

All bacteria are bad?

Remember Robert O. Young? He’s the purveyor of only the finest quackery. Note that, by “finest,” I mean the most highly entertaining, the sort of utter twaddle that makes me laugh out loud when I read it. Whether it’s his claim that alkalinization is the cure for basically all disease, his characterizing sepsis as not […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery

The DCA zombie arises again

Remember dichloroacetate, also known as DCA? This is a relatively simple compound that showed promise in rodent models of cancer four years ago, leading to an Internet meme that “scientists cure cancer, but no one notices.” It also lead to scammers trying to take advantage of desperately ill cancer patients. The whole sordid story is […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Vaccines and infant mortality rates

The anti-vaccine movement is a frequent topic on this blog, sometimes to the point where it seems to take over the blog for days (or even weeks) at a time and I cry for respite. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which being that the anti-vaccine movement is one […]

Categories
Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

An actual skeptical news report on Power Balance bracelets?

First Oz, now this. Too bad Dr. Novella’s appearance was so short: At least they got Banachek to do a quick and dirty trial that helped to demonstrate that these bracelets do not work. Unfortunately, the power of belief is strong; several of the people who underwent the testing still wanted to fork over $30 […]