Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

One more example of the price of refusing science-based cancer therapy

Another year, another Breast Cancer Awareness Month. While most people who have either been touched by breast cancer or who have a professional interest in it, the significance of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is that it is a time, well, to increase awareness and to promote breast cancer research. There is another side to Breast […]

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Biology Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Bad science about GMOs: It reminds me of the antivaccine movement

Ideologically motivated bad science, pseudoscience, misinformation, and lies irritate me. In fact, arguably, they are the very reason I started this blog. True, over time my focus has narrowed. I used to write a lot more about creationism, more general skeptical topics, Holocaust denial, 9/11 Trutherism, and the like, but these days I rarely write […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Entertainment/culture Television

Journalists of the future make a vaccine documentary

The broadcast class at Carlsbad High School decided to make a documentary about vaccines. Unfortunately for them, antivaxers didn’t like that. Even high school students aren’t off-limits for antivax attacks,

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine

Respecting parental concerns versus pandering to antivaccine fears

In common colloquial usage, there is a term known as “gaydar.” Basically, it’s the ability some people claim to have that allows them to identify people who are gay. Whether gaydar actually exists or not, I don’t know, but I claim to have an ability that’s similar. That ability is the ability to sniff out […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The director and deputy director of NCCAM pontificate about “scientific plausibility”

One of the overarching issues, if not the overarching issue that makes so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM)—or, as it’s now more commonly called, “integrative medicine”—so problematic is prior plausibility. It’s also one of the most difficult to explain to the lay public, because to someone not trained in science it can sound like not […]