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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

More quackery promotion in the Chicago Tribune, only this time not by Julie Deardorff

Something must be wrong these days with the Chicago Tribune. I’ve complained about its recent tendency to publish credulous tripe about “alternative” medicine or sympathetic articles about alternative medicine, usually in the form of columns by the ever woo-friendly Julie Deardorff, but also in the form of a truly dumb (at least about medicine) columnist […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Arrogance: The mercury militia responds to the NEJM article on thimerosal-containing vaccines

Pity the investigators at the CDC studying whether thimerosal, the mercury-containing preservative pilloried by the antivaccination movement as the cause of autism and everything that is evil in medicine. Three months ago, they published a high profile article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled Early Thimerosal Exposure and Neuropsychological Outcomes at 7 to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Religion

Is Bill Maher really that ignorant? (Part II)

Here’s part 1. Here’s part II. It’s Bill Maher on David Letterman ranting about “toxins,” how we are being “poisoned by America,” and how your body is trying to produce a “river of mucus” to rid itself of the toxins, all standard tropes of “alternative” medicine and quackery. Sadly, David Letterman seems to buy right […]

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Humor Science fiction/fantasy

Doctor Who: Revolutionary or tool of The Man?

Charlie Anders seeks to answer that very question: (Click on the graph above to go to the full size original graph, which graphs the frequency of stories per season in which the Doctor is portrayed as overthrowing the government or the status quo or foments a rebellion.) Although the arch-conservatism of the John Pertwee-era Doctor […]

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Medicine Religion Surgery

Resolved for 2008: Let’s not use the word “miracle” when we really mean “unexpected survival”

“It’s a miracle!” How many times have you heard that one, usually invoked when someone survives serious injuries that would kill most people? Personally, the use of the word grates on me and did even when I was a lot more religious than I am now. Yesterday, it grated on me when I saw this […]