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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Quoth Mark “not a doctor, not a scientist” Blaxill: “Help, help, Andy Wakefield’s being repressed!”

Help! Help! I’m being repressed. Somehow, that is the image I have gotten in the three weeks since the very last shred of Andrew Wakefield’s facade of scientific respectability tumbled. As you may recall, at the end of January, the British General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield, the man whose trial lawyer-funded, breathtakingly incompetent, and […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Homeopathy gets needled

I realize that there are two huge target-rich articles out there that my readers have been clamoring for me to comment on. First, there’s a particularly silly and simplistic article by Nicholas Kristof about how it’s supposedly the “toxins” causing autism (an article in which he apparently doesn’t realize that Current Opinions in Pediatrics is […]

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Bioethics Biology Medicine Politics Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Best comments of the day on animal rights bullies

I have to admit, this one made me chuckle. In an earlier post today, in which I expressed my outrage at animal rights terrorists targeting an investigator’s children for harassment at their school, I asked the following question: That reminds me: Where were these animal rights loons when “Andrew Wakefield was torturing baby Macacque monkeys […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Andrew Wakefield: Destined for even more disrepute

I must admit that I never saw it coming. At least, I never saw it coming this fast and this dramatically. After all, this is a saga that has been going on for twelve solid years now, and it’s an investigation that has been going on at least since 2004. I’m referring, of course, to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Shifting goalposts, shifting stories

On Wednesday, Steve Novella did a nice analysis of the recent study showing that signs of autism can be detected as early as six months of age. However, it was flawed by one clear misstatement, which was brought to his attention in the comments and which he then promptly corrected. Not that that stopped our […]