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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Fear the omniscience of Orac, evildoers!

Orac knows all. Orac sees all. Orac discovers all. Anti-vaccine loons, know this and tremble, as Teresa Conrick over at J.B. Handley’s–excuse me, Jenny McCarthy’s–home for happy anti-vaccine propagandists has: While googling to find the Tribune article, I instead found Orac’s site. Who is Orac? Well, suffice to say that he has some mysterious desire […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Jenny McCarthy drives the stupidity to ever higher levels on–where else?–The Huffington Post

Way back on May 25, 2005, I first noticed something about a certain political group blog. It was something unsavory, something vile, something pseudoscientific. It was the fetid stench of quackery, but not just any quackery. It was anti-vaccine quackery, and the blog was Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post, where a mere 16 days after its […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Homeopathy vs. science?

I have a hard time arguing against the proposition that this is the perfect metaphor for homeopathy. Well, not exactly. The homeopath and homeopathy user are both far too rational in this example.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Taking a vaccine injury case to the Supreme Court

I haven’t written much about this before, at least not in this context, but vaccine scares are nothing new, nor is execrably fear mongering journalism about vaccines. Those of you who read Paul Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets or Arthur Allen’s Vaccine probably know about a particularly egregious example of both that occurred in the early […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery

“Big supplement” lashes out, and John McCain caves in

If there’s one law that (most) supporters of science-based medicine detest and would love to see repealed, it’s the Dietary Supplement and Health Act of 1994 (DSHEA). The reason is that this law, arguably more than almost anything else, allowed for the proliferation of supplements and claims made for these supplements that aren’t based in […]