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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Popular culture Television

Goodbye to false balance over vaccines and autism! May you stay gone!

I realize that Chris Mooney is a polarizing figure here on the ol’ ScienceBlogs, but I have to give him props for doing a damned fine job handling questions about vaccines, autism, and Andrew Wakefield’s utterly discredited 1998 Lancet study, which was retracted by the Lancet‘s editors last week: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Franchising autism “biomed” woo

Remember Mark and David Geier? I wouldn’t be surprised if regular readers may have forgotten about this father-son tag team of anti-vaccine lunacy and autism woo. After all, I haven’t written about them since journalist Trine Tsouderos did her expose of their “Lupron protocol” for the Chicago Tribune nine months ago. Long time readers, however, […]

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Medicine

The 130th Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle

I’ve been a bad, bad organizer. Poor Martin went through all that work to put together another bang up Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle (the 130th, to be precise), and I didn’t publicize it. Well, hopefully better late than never. Go. Read. Learn. Then don’t forget that less than two weeks hence, on February 25, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Movies Popular culture Quackery Television

Blocked by Fire Marshal Bill!

I feel really, really good today. The reason? Simple Orac has annoyed Jim Carrey enough to ban him on Twitter. The exchange went something like this. For the first time in a while, I was perusing Twitter (I have a really hard time keeping my Insolence to 140 characters; so I only check my Twitter […]

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Bioethics Biology Medicine Science

Update on the case of “Coma Man” Rom Houben: Facilitated communication is still woo

A couple of months ago, I wrote about a case that demonstrated conclusively just how easily even respected researchers can be taken in by psuedoscience. Of course, I was not alone. A number of others, including Steve Novella, James Randi, bioethicist Art Caplan, Hank Schlinger, and myself, recognized the reports that a Belgian man named […]