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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

A couple of cranks: Compare and contrast

It was a busy day yesterday, and I had less time than usual to attend to the blog, but that’s OK. This random thought popped into my head after spending the last three days writing about Stanislaw Burzynski, first reviewing Eric Merola’s hagiography and infomercial about him, then seeing how well the BBC did in […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery

Calling out false “balance” on vaccines and autism

Manufactroversy. It’s wonderful, made-up word that describes a phenomenon so aptly, so brilliantly, that I like to use it all the time. Basically the word describes a manufactured controversy that is motivated by either extreme ideology (virtually always crank ideology) and/or profit that is intentionally stoked to create public confusion about a scientific issue that […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies

Eric Merola and Stanislaw Burzynski’s secret weapon against The Skeptics™: Fabio Lanzoni (Part 2)

I’ve been very, very critical of a self-proclaimed cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski, who is not an oncologist but somehow has managed over the last 36 years to treat patients with unapproved cancer drugs, list dozens of phase 2 clinical trials in ClinicalTrials.gov but never publish a completed one (at least to this date), and […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

“All truth comes from public debate”: A corollary to crank magnetism

Advocates of pseudoscience like antivaxers love public debates. In fact, they think such debates are an excellent way to get at the truth. That’s not how science works.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine

The “I told you so” fantasy, or: The fallacy of future vindication

Cranks love to fantasize that their ideas will be vindicated in the future. The fantasy almost never becomes reality.