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Cancer Medicine Politics Quackery

Quackery of a different kind than I usually write about

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog discussing failures of the medical system. Usually, such discussions occur in the context of how unscientific practices and even outright quackery have managed to infiltrate what should be science=based medicine (SBM) in the form of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine,” in which […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

Antivaccinationists against the HPV vaccine, Round 5,000

Whenever I take a day off from blogging, as I did yesterday because I was too busy going out with my wife on Wednesday night to celebrate my birthday, I not infrequently find an embarrassment of riches to blog about the next day. Sometimes it’s downright difficult to decide what to write about. So it […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Science

Clinical trials do still work, but need to evolve

As I write this, I’m winging my way home from TAM, crammed uncomfortably—very uncomfortably—in a window seat in steerage—I mean, coach). I had thought of simply recounting the adventures of the contingent of skeptics with whom I’m associated who did make it out to TAM to give talks at workshops and the main stage and […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Jenny McCarthy, antivaccine lunacy, and “The View”

Like Steve, I’m off to The Amazing Meeting today. I don’t know how much I’ll be posting, but, as Han Solo so famously said, “Hey, it’s me.” I’m sure I won’t be able to resist. In any case, I’ll be taking part in the Science-Based Medicine workshop tomorrow, and, for the first time ever, I’ll […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy

“Believe in facts”? You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Vaccine scientist and advocate Dr. Paul Offit recently published a book on the pseudoscience of alternative medicine. Not surprisingly, the antivaccine cranks at Age of Autism, led by Anne Rachel, don’t like that.