Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

On teaching pseudoscientific controversies in universities…

About a month ago, a number of news stories were published reporting that the University of Toronto had offered a course in alternative medicine taught by a homeopath named Beth Laundau-Halpern that presented a segment that was clearly highly biased towards antivaccine pseudoscience. It was worse than that, though, because this homeopathy just happened to […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

The intellectual dishonesty of the “vaccines didn’t save us” gambit

If there’s one thing about the anti-vaccine movement I’ve learned over the last five or so years, it’s that it’s virtually completely immune to evidence, science, and reason. No matter how much evidence is arrayed against it, it always finds a way to spin, distort, or misrepresent it to combat the evidence. Not that this […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

How not to do a study on the efficacy of “alternative” medicine

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last four years of examining the various forms of woo out there, it’s to be very, very skeptical whenever an advocate of a highly dubious-sounding “therapy” points to a study as “proof” that the therapy, whatever it is, works. Usually, what I find is a small pilot […]

Categories
Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking Surgery

Facepalm, thy name is Dr. Egnor! Or: I find your excess of faith in the scientific abilities of physicians…disturbing

I have to wonder if the most famous denizen of the Discovery Institute in medical circles, Dr. Michael Egnor, is on vacation or something. For some reason, he’s been especially active over at the Discovery Institute’s repository of pseudoscience, Evolution News & Views, over the last couple of weeks. Neurosurgeons tend to be very busy […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Autism’s False Prophets: Finally, science pushes back against antivaccine lunacy

NOTE: This review of Dr. Offit’s book Autism’s False Prophets originally appeared over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club. However, now that the book club for this particular book has concluded, I am free to repost it here for those who may not have seen it and to archive it as one of my own posts. […]