Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

The Yale Journal of Medicine & Law blows it big time on alternative medicine

It’s always frightening when lawyers delve into the realm of medicine. It’s even worse when pre-law students and political science majors do the same. Such was the thought running through my mind when I came across the most recent issue of the Yale Journal of Medicine & Law. The result is what I would most […]

Categories
Clinical trials Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Scientific fraud and journal article retractions

A week ago, I took someone who has normally been a hero of mine, Brian Deer, to task for what I considered to be a seriously cheap shot at scientists based on no hard data, at least no hard data that he bothered to present. To make a long, Orac-ian magnum opus short, Deer advocated […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Tell both sides” strikes again in vaccine reporting

Over the years that I’ve been following the anti-vaccine movement, I’ve become familiar with typical narratives that reporters use when reporting on the vaccine fears stirred up by anti-vaccine activists. One narrative is the “brave maverick doctor” narrative, in which an iconoclastic quack (such as Mark Geier or Andrew Wakefield, for example) is portrayed fighting […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

In which I disagree with Brian Deer on the issue of how to deal with scientific fraud

I admire Brian Deer. I really do. He’s put up with incredible amounts of abuse and gone to amazing lengths to unmask the vaccine quack Andrew Wakefield, the man whose fraudulent case series published in The Lancet thirteen years ago launched a thousand quack autism remedies and, worst of all, contributed to a scare over […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

What is Generation Rescue selling now?

Oh, geez. You might have noticed that I haven’t written much about Jenny McCarthy in a while. The reason is fairly obvious. She seems to have faded into the background as far as her previous promotion of a vaccine-autism link. Three years ago, she was leading marches on Washington in which anti-vaccine activists claiming not […]