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

The fixed mindset of medical pseudoscience

One of the key principles of skepticism, particularly in medicine, is that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. I emphasize the word “necessarily” because sometimes skeptics go a bit too far and say that correlation does not equal causation. I myself used to phrase it that way for a long time. However, sometimes correlation does […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

An “un-American suppression” of antivaccine views or good reporting?

I’ve been writing a lot of posts on what I like to call the “antivaccine dogwhistle.” In politics, a “dog whistle” refers to rhetoric that sounds to the average person to be reasonable and even admirable but, like the way that a dog whistle can’t be heard by humans because the frequency of its tone […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Blowing the antivaccine dog whistle again

You remember Dr. Bob, don’t you? I’m referring, of course, to Robert “Dr. Bob” Sears, the Capistrano Beach, CA pediatrician who’s arguably the most famous of the antivaccine pediatricians who have been spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about vaccines. (Sorry, Dr. Jay, but, regardless of your being Jenny McCarthy’s son’s pediatrician, I’d bet that […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Happy New Year! Vaccines do not cause autism in 2015, either

So here it is, already a week into 2015. Truth be told, I’m still finding myself having a hard time believing that it’s already 2015, but then I say that about every year in early January. Be that as it may, I’ve already seen one hopeful sign that it could be a decent year when […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science

Oh, no! GMOs are going to make everyone autistic!

She’s baa-aack. Remember Stephanie Seneff? When last Orac discussed her, she had been caught dumpster diving into the VAERS database in order to torture the data to make it confess a “link” between aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and acetaminophen and—you guessed it!—autism. It was a bad paper in a bad journal known as Entropy that […]