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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

What’s in a placebo? Mike Adams certainly doesn’t know.

If there’s one thing that confounds advocates of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), it’s the placebo effect. That’s because, whenever most such remedies are studied using rigorous clinical trial design using properly constituted placebo controls, they almost always end up showing effects no greater than placebo effects. That’s the main reason why they frequently […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

Vaccine Awareness Week begins: Raymond Obomsawin is still spreading the same misinformation

As brief as it will be, this is my first post for my self-declared Vaccine Awareness Week, proposed to counter Barbara Loe Fisher’s National Vaccine Information Center’s and Joe Mercola’s proposal that November 1-6 be designated “Vaccine Awareness Week” for the purpose of promoting all sorts of pseudoscience, quackery, and misinformation about “vaccine injury” and […]

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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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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience

Battling misinformed consent: How should we respond to the anti-vaccine movement?

Antivaxers frequently claim that they are champions of “informed consent.” In reality, their version of informed consent is a parody of consent that I like to refer to as “misinformed consent.”

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The complexity of cancer, part II: Enter the quacks

A couple of days ago, I couldn’t resist discussing a recent article in the New York Times about recent discoveries in cancer research. I considered the article to be a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. While the article did a pretty good job of describing recent discoveries about how noncoding RNA, […]