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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

Anti-vaccine grande dame Barbara Loe Fisher cries “intimidation”

A couple of weeks ago, I sounded the alarm regarding a highly deceptive public service announcement/infomercial being run on some Delta Airlines flights, courtesy of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). That’s the organization founded by the grand dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, who features prominently in the PSA. I call this […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Brian Deer strikes again: More evidence of the worthlessness of Andrew Wakefield’s “research”

I had been wondering why the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism had been gearing up the slime machine against Brian Deer lately. For example, former UPI reporter turned vaccine/autism cran Dan Olmsted has been attacking the BMJ. As you recall, the BMGpublished Brian Deer’s latest revelations earlier this year when he quite pithily and […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

“Misinformed consent” rears its ugly head in Pediatrics

I’ve written about the concept of “misinformed” consent with respect to the anti-vaccine movement. To summarize, “misinformed consent” is a perversion of the concept of informed consent in which cranks claim to be championing true informed consent (and, by implication, that opponents have not) when in fact they are presenting a scientifically unsupportable assessment of […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Using language to achieve the appearance of legitimacy for quacks

The whole concept of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) and “integrative medicine” (IM), the former of which “complements” science-based medicine with quackery and the latter of which “integrates” pseudoscience-based with science-based medicine. The reason I start out by saying this is to emphasize that CAM/IM is all about using language to persuade that pseudoscience is […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Consumer warnings” about Adya Clarity: Has Mike Adams had a sudden attack of conscience?

I’ve been blogging about alternative medicine for nearly seven years and writing about it, either on Usenet or in other forums for several years before. As a result, there are times when I start to think that maybe I’ve seen it all. And almost every time I start thinking that, I come across something that […]