Like most people, I have my limits. Actually, I have a pretty high tolerance for tastelessness. It’s a necessity in a world like this, where tastelessness increasingly goes beyond the pale. But even I am not above finding something like this so tasteless and offensive that I can only shake my head: RIO DE JANEIRO […]
A few days ago, I was amused by a term coined by Dr. R.W. The term, “quackademic medicine,” was meant to describe the unholy fusion of non-science- and non-evidence-based woo that has infiltrated academic medicine to a disturbing extent over the last decade or two. There was a lot of reaction, mainly positive, to the […]
Last week, I did one of my inimitable rants about an ABC television show set to air on Thursday called Eli Stone, in which a lawyer sues a pharmaceutical company for “mercuritol” (an obvious allusion to thimerosal) in vaccines and how it supposedly caused a child’s autism. Basically, I called it an irresponsible bit of […]
The other day I mentioned the now-infamous magic Alzheimer’s helmet, a device being hyped to the press by a group of scientists on the basis of very little data. Believe it or not, of all organizations, ABC News has published an article citing the skeptics’ side. It starts: What if the secret to stopping the […]
In nondescript dressing room in a nondescript studio in a nondescript office building in in a nondescript industrial park, a short, pudgy 63-year-old man with the stereotypical demeanor of a particularly boring economist was trying to squeeze into a pair of shorts. “Why oh why did I agree to do this?” he muttered in a […]
