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Autism Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Luc Montagnier: The Nobel disease strikes again

They call it the Nobel disease. Linus Pauling is the prototypical example. A brilliant chemist who won two Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, in his later years Pauling became convinced that high dose vitamin C was a highly effective treatment for cancer and the common cold and, expanding upon that, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Battleground movie theaters: Skeptical activism versus the anti-vaccine movement

It figures. I’m gone for a couple of days, paying little attention to the blogosphere or the Internet, and something big has to happen. Remember a couple of weeks ago, when in the context of asking how we should respond to the anti-vaccine movement I discussed a recent campaign by the anti-vaccine group SafeMinds to […]

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Biology Science

Skeptoid disappoints about DDT and the environment

You may have noticed that there wasn’t the usual 3,000 word heapin’ helpin’ of Insolence this morning. That’s because I happened to be away visiting family in Chicago over the weekend and I just didn’t have time to come up with anything–and I enjoyed myself too thoroughly to worry overmuch about it. In case you’re […]

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Homeopathy Humor Medicine Quackery

Taking the piss out of homeopathy

Silly Crispian, any homeopath will tell you that this isn’t a valid test of homeopathy because you didn’t adequately succuss at each step. (Of course, then there’s the issue of succussing it against a Bible, which Hahnemann himself favored.) I also would have recommended using a different pipette for each dilution to make sure there […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Falling for one manufactroversy

The other day I had a bit of fun deconstructing a shockingly bad post by a blogger at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism named Dan Olmsted. In his post, he criticized the progressive movement for not “getting” autism. It was one of the silliest bits of whining I had ever seen, in essence […]