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Entertainment/culture Intelligent design/creationism Movies Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

A hometown publication “gets it” about Expelled!

Heh. Before I abandon the disgusting piece of fecal matter that is Ben Stein’s Expelled! for (hopefully) a long, long time, if not forever, I can’t resist pointing out that it’s good to see that at least someone totally gets it and sees through the lies. It’s even better to see it coming from a […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Why aren’t there more clinical trials studying the effect of CAM on cancer?” cries the CAM advocate

I’ve lamented time and time again just how much money the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) wastes on basic research and clinical trials of modalities that are, from a scientific viewpoint, so highly implausible that the chances of finding a clinically useful or relevant–or even a consistent statistically significant–effect (for example, homeopathy […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Integrative” medicine at Yale: A more “fluid” concept of evidence?

I realize that I’ve been very, very remiss in attending to a task that I’ve been meaning to get to since late January. There are several reasons, albeit not excuses, for why I have failed to do this task. Perhaps the most powerful impediment to my overcoming my inertia and just diving in and doing […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A perfect storm of quackademic medicine and bad journalism

I sometimes wonder if the world is laughing at me. Let me explain. A while ago I compiled a list of academic medical institutions that–shall we say?–are far more receptive to pseudoscientific and downright unscientific medicine in the form of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), otherwise known as “integrative medicine.” I dubbed this list […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Green Our Vaccines”: The fallacy of the perfect solution

Don’t worry, faithful readers, my blogging about the “Green Our Vaccines” rally last week is reaching its end. If my poor neurons can take it, there are still the speeches of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Jay Gordon to be commented on in one more post (the latter of whom I used to consider […]