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Announcements Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Science Friday is (partially) Vaccine Friday, complete with the Dark Lord of Vaccination himself

I hesitated about whether to post this, knowing how many antivaccine activists read this blog, which is why I didn’t post it yesterday. Still, I think this might be of sufficient interest to my readers that I thought I’d announce it, just with relatively short notice. It turns out that today’s Science Friday with Ira […]

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Clinical trials Medicine

Another reason why I’m leery of meta-analyses

The single most necessary task for a physician practicing science- and evidence-based medicine is the evaluation of the biomedical literature to extract from it just what science and the evidence support as the best medical therapy for a given situation. It is rare for the literature to be so clear on a topic that different […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

“Outing” anonymous bloggers: A favorite technique of antivaccine cranks

A reader of this blog was outed by a moron posting as “Mark” on the Age of Autism blog. I will not link to the outing, nor will I link to Age of Autism. I have, however, kept a nice screen shot of the page, just in case someone over there has an attack of […]

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Announcements

The 94th Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle: The Skeptic Games

I lamented how much I needed it, given the persistence of a couple of particularly annoying and obtuse antivaccinationist trolls over the last couple of weeks. Finally, it’s here! We’re talking the 94th Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle over at Reduce to Common Sense. It’s just what I (and hopefully you) need: A dose of […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The largest “randomized” acupuncture study ever done: Why did they even bother?

Believe it or not, there was one area of so-called “alternative” medicine that I used to be a lot less skeptical about than I am now. Homeopathy, I always realized to be a load of pseudoscientific magical thinking. Ditto reiki, therapeutic touch, and other forms of “energy healing.” It didn’t take an extensive review of […]