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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Battleground movie theaters: Skeptical activism versus the anti-vaccine movement

It figures. I’m gone for a couple of days, paying little attention to the blogosphere or the Internet, and something big has to happen. Remember a couple of weeks ago, when in the context of asking how we should respond to the anti-vaccine movement I discussed a recent campaign by the anti-vaccine group SafeMinds to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Humor Medicine

Blaming failure to promote anti-vaccine views on “progressivism,” briefly revisited

Earlier today, I had a bit of fun deconstructing Dan Olmsted’s whiny complaint about how “progressives don’t ‘get’ autism,” his definition of “getting” autism being, of course, buying into the scientifically discredited notion that vaccines cause autism and the quackery known as “autism biomed” that anti-vaccine loons like Olmsted advocate to “recover” autistic children. Of […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

J.B. Handley: Attacking the AAP over vaccines…again

I may have taken a break yesterday, but that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned my mission to make this Vaccine Awareness Week (or, more properly, the Anti-vaccine Movement Awareness Week, dedicated to countering the lies of the anti-vaccine movement). Even though it was good to take a day off, the anti-vaccine movement rarely takes a day […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Dr. Mark Hyman: Let’s turn back the clock on science-based medicine in favor of anecdote-based medicine

I sometimes think I ought to send a thank you letter to Dr. Mark Hyman. True, I don’t owe him quite as much as I owe, for example, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com, anyone on the blogging crew of the anti-vaccine crank propaganda blog Age of Autism, Dr. Jay Gordon, or several other pseudoscientists, quacks, or […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Science

The Guatemala syphilis experiment, human subjects research abuses, and CAM

If there’s one thing that burns me about so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) clinical trials, it’s how unethical many of them are. This is particularly true for trials that test modalities that, on the basic science grounds alone, can be dismissed as so highly implausible and with such a low prior probability of success […]