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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

“SmartVax”: The Orwellian repackaging of old anti-vaccine tropes

It appears that while TAM9 was dominating all my extracurricular, non-job-related attention, with my having to get ready to give a talk, I failed to notice another thing besides the placebo/asthma paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine last Thursday. But fear not. If it’s important (to me, at least, and hopefully to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Bad science and bad arguments for “integrative pediatrics”

There’s a website out there that calls itself Opposing Views. I haven’t visited it in a while, but its very reason for existence and philosophy seems to be built on the “tell both sides” fallacy that so irritates me. In other words, Opposing Views appears to be built from the ground up to provide “balance” […]

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Biology Clinical trials Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Dr. Egnor has his own blog now. Hilarity ensues about evolution and medicine.

Remember Michael Egnor? I bet many of you do. If you were reading this blog three or four years ago, Dr. Egnor was a fairly regular target topic of my excretions of not-so-Respectful Insolence. The reason for that was, at the time, I was quite annoyed that a fellow surgeon could so regularly lay down […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

A vaccination tool every parent could use

Regular readers know that I lived in Chicago for three years in the late 1990s. Indeed, Chicago is probably my favorite city in the world, and my years there count as three of the happiest years of my life. I lived in a cool neighborhood near DePaul in Lincoln Park; never again in my life […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Expelled!, anti-vaccine style, 2011 edition (continued)

Today’s a holiday here in the U.S. You’d think that I’d be taking it easy, but, sadly, thanks to the insatiable needs of the NIH grant monster, today, as I was doing most of the day Saturday and part of the day yesterday, will be working on grants; that is, when I don’t take a […]