Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A mathematical model for the persistence of quackery

I’m sure it’s obvious that I’m often puzzled (and, I daresay, many other skeptics and boosters of science- and evidence-based medicine are puzzled too) over why various forms of quackery and woo that have either about as close to zero prior probability as one can imagine and/or (more frequently “and”) have failed to show evidence […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Fresh from HuffPo: Antibiotics cause cancer?

I’m really starting to hate the Huffington Post. It used to be that I just disliked it intensely. The reasons are, of course, obvious. Ever since its very beginning nearly four years ago, HuffPo has been a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. Over the years, it’s served up pseudoscience and antivaccine nuttery from such “luminaries” of […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

In which I echo PalMD…

Blog bud PalMD was asked this most difficult question: A colleague of mine asked a great question: if you have one question to ask a booster of so-called alternative medicine in a public forum, what should it be? To which he responded: My answer: “Can you please give specific examples of alternative medicine theories and […]

Categories
History Holocaust Holocaust denial Politics World War II

In case you wondered whether David Irving is a Hitler admirer…

David Irving has made a career out of being a Holocaust denier and then protesting when someone calls him a Holocaust denier. As you may recall, he even sued Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt for correctly referring to him as a Holocaust denier in one of her books. Let’s take a look at what’s on his […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Generation Rescue and “Fourteen Studies”

About a week and a half ago, something happened that makes me realize that the Jenny and Jim antivaccine propaganda tour that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was clearly only phase I of Generation Rescue’s April public relations offensive. About ten days ago, courtesy of J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, who […]