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

Accusations against skeptical physicians: 1. “You have no compassion”

Sometimes I wonder if subjecting myself to all this woo is going to my head. Why do I worry that this might be the case? Recently, I made the mistake of getting involved in an e-mail exchange with a prominent antivaccinationist. Perhaps it was my eternal optimism that led me to do this, my inability […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: It’s not just silver, it’s super-duper holy silver!

The woo is good again. Regular readers may have caught an undercurrent of whining in the last few installments of my little Friday feature? Whining about what? A bit of burnout. In fact, looking back at my last few installments, I now wonder whether I was starting to show signs of burnout. There I was, […]

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

Your Friday Dose of Woo: What is an “altie”? (2008 edition)

It’s that time of year again. Actually, it’s well over a month past that time of year. Long-timers may remember that, near the very beginning of my old Blogger blog over three years ago, I did a post entitled What is an altie? It was basically a Jeff Foxworthy-like listing of “You just might be […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Medicine Quackery

Stem cell tourism: Stem cells as the new snake oil

There’s no doubt about it: Stem cells are hot. Yes indeed, they’re not only hot, but they’re hip, they’re happenin‘, they’re right now, baby. Scientists are falling all over themselves with excitement at the potential applications that could potentially come from stem cell technology. True, no validated therapies for embryonic stem cells have yet made […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

More quackery promotion in the Chicago Tribune, only this time not by Julie Deardorff

Something must be wrong these days with the Chicago Tribune. I’ve complained about its recent tendency to publish credulous tripe about “alternative” medicine or sympathetic articles about alternative medicine, usually in the form of columns by the ever woo-friendly Julie Deardorff, but also in the form of a truly dumb (at least about medicine) columnist […]