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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

Now I’ve seen it all: An anti-vaccine children’s book

I’ve been so busy writing about things like Dr. Stanislaw Burzysnki’s highly exaggerated cancer claims, which have become a new favorite topic of mine despite the fact that Dr. Burzynski himself has been plying his “alternative” cancer treatments for over three decades, and one of my long time topics, the National Center for Complementary and […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

Revisiting the question of “individualization” of treatments in “alternative” medicine

I kind of miss Peter Lipson on ScienceBlogs and wish he were still around. I realize it’s been nearly a year and a half since he departed, but it’s been a bit lonely here being the only physician blogging about quackery, the role of science in medicine, and other skeptical topics related to medicine. This […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Legal thuggery, antivaccine edition: Andrew Wakefield sues Brian Deer, the BMJ, and Fiona Godlee

If there’s one thing that a crank, quack, pseudoscientist, or anti-vaccine propagandist doesn’t like, it’s having the light of day shined upon his activities. In fact, so much do they hate it that they have a distressing tendency to respond to science-based criticism not with science-based rebuttals (mainly because they can’t given that they don’t […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Dr. Francis Collins and “integrative oncology”

I was disturbed several months ago when I learned that the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, had agreed to be the keynote speaker at the Eight International Society for Integrative Oncology Conference in Cleveland, OH. I say “doubly” disturbed because it disturbed me that Francis Collins would agree to speak at […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Tactics and tropes of the antivaccine movement

I’ve been an observer and student of the antivaccine movement for nearly a decade now, although my intensive education began almost seven years ago, in early 2005, not long after I started blogging. It was then that I first encountered several “luminaries” of the antivaccine movement both throughout the blogosphere and sometimes even commenting on […]