Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The hypocrisy of anti-vaccine activists

If there’s one thing about the anti-vaccine movement in general and one of its chief mouthpieces for propaganda, the Age of Autism blog, in particular, it’s rank hypocrisy. One of the key tenets of anti-vaccine ideology is an unrelenting distrust of big pharma. While that in and of itself would not be entirely unreasonable, given […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Biology Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Melanie Phillips: Crank magnetism in action on evolution and vaccines

A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Quackery

Whoa. Could it be? An actual science-based article at The Huffington Post?

Pinch me. I must be dreaming. I say that because I actually see an article in The Huffington Post in which the blogger, Jacob Dickerman, actually correctly describes why homeopathy is quackery! For instance: Homeopaths will tell us that water has a memory. That it vibrates in a certain way and thus knows exactly what […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Homeopathy kills a child

Homeopathy is water. Homeopaths will tell you otherwise. They will tell you that water “memory,” which, the way they describe it is some mystical property whereby it “remembers” the remedy with which it’s been in contact, even though the substance (whatever it was) has been diluted far beyond the point where there’s likely to be […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Television

The best snark at Oprah Winfrey…

…comes, from of all places, Gawker: Oh, good, Oprah is going to give Jenny McCarthy a talk show, because she wants your kid to die of the measles. McCarthy, a famous celebrity from the long-defunct Playboy magazine and much missed MTV channel, has been on a crusade to find an evildoer responsible for her son’s […]