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

Ya burnt! 12-year-old Marco Arturo responds to attacks by antivaccine bloggers

Last week, I noted with great approval how a 12-year-old boy named Marco Arturo made a pro-vaccine video that was short, simple, and effective. Even better, it was as Insolent as anything Orac could expect to manage, making it that much more delicious. Indeed, I can’t resist including it again for those of you who […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

An acupuncturist attacks “pseudoskeptics” on Wikipedia. Hilarity ensues.

Back in the day, quacks and cranks liked Wikipedia. Because anyone can become an editor on Wikipedia, they assumed that they could just sign up to edit Wikipedia pages and change them to reflect their views on alternative medicine or whatever other pseudoscientific topic they believed in. When Wikipedia first emerged on the scene, I […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies Popular culture Quackery

Antivaccine activists bully high school filmmakers over a student documentary about vaccines

There’s a certain category of posts that I like to call (to myself, anyway) “taking care of business” posts. Usually, it’s a post about something that I missed the first time around but has, for some reason, reappeared on my radar screen or something that I wish I had written about when it first showed […]

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Medicine

Brian Martin and Judy Wilyman: Promoting antivaccine pseudoscience as “dissent”

Yesterday, I wrote about what can only be described as an academic travesty. What riled me up sufficiently to lay a heapin’ helpin’ of not-so-Respectful Insolence on a graduate student named Judy Wilyman, her PhD thesis advisor Brian Martin, and the University of Wollongong was the fact that Wilyman is an antivaccine loon and the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement

I originally wasn’t going to write about this particular post, but the mass shooting in San Bernardino yesterday led me to change my mind. For those of you who either aren’t in the US or were somehow cut off from media for the last 18 hours or so, yesterday a heavily armed man and woman […]