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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

How not to do “personalized medicine” to treat Alzheimer’s disease

With the aging of the population, one of the most feared potential manners by which more and more of us will leave this earth is through Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. And it is a scary thing, too. Having valued my intelligence all my life and in particular enjoying the intellectual stimulation that […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Pumping autistic children full of an industrial chelator (revisited)

Remember Boyd Haley? He’s the Professor and former Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky whose formerly respectable career tanked because he fell into pseudoscience. For whatever reason, a while back he became enamored first of dental amalgam quackery to the point where he became involved in organizations like Consumers for […]

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Clinical trials Medicine

Don’t get sick in July? (Revisited)

June is almost over. If you work in an academic medical center, as I do, that can mean only one thing. The new interns are coming, and existing residents will soon be advancing to the next level. The joy! The excitement! The trepidation! And it’s not all just the senior residents and the faculty feeling […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Repeat after me: Enforcing medical and scientific standards is not “censorship”

I don’t mean to beat up on Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick. I really don’t. I realize I rather harshly criticized him yesterday for being so hostile to the concept of “denialism,” to the point where he characterized even the use of the term as a means of “suppressing” free speech. Normally, that criticism would have been […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Even more hysterical than Age of Autism?

Remember how I had a little fun with Katie Wright’s overheated rhetoric about Kathleen Sebelius’ request to the press that they not give equal weight to anti-vaccine cranks when they report about issues of vaccines? Her exact words, if you will recall, were: There are groups out there that insist that vaccines are responsible for […]