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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Criticism of pseudoscience and quackery is not "hate speech"

I sense a new disturbance in the antivaccine force. I hadn’t planned on blogging about the antivaccine movement again, but I felt that I needed to do a follow up to yesterday’s (hopefully) amusing little takedown of the antivaccine stylings of new member of that group personification of the Dunning-Kruger effect and arrogance of ignorance, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Politics Quackery Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

California children betrayed: Governor Jerry Brown and the neutering of a law designed to make vaccine exemptions harder to get

About a year ago, I became aware of the latest celebrity antivaccinationist with a penchant for saying truly stupid things and thus making an even bigger fool of himself than he usually does. I’m referring to Rob “makin’ copies” Schneider, who most recently has been making waves for narrating a misinformation-packed “viral” video about the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

Deepak Chopra woo-fully whines about those nasty skeptics on Wikipedia

It occurs to me that things have been perhaps overly serious here at the ol’ blog for the last couple of weeks. Don’t get me wrong. I think I done good lately, if I do say so myself. However, the constant drumbeat of quackery and depressing stories takes its toll after a while. I need […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

Stanislaw Burzynski: On the arrogance of ignorance about cancer and targeted therapies

Here we go again. Because he’s been in the news lately, I’ve been writing a lot about the “brave maverick doctor” known as Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have spectacular results treating normally incurable cancers using something he calls antineoplastons. Unfortunately, the reason Burzynski has featured prominently in the skeptical blogosphere over the last two […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Naturopathy Quackery

Evidence-based medicine: More than a “coin flip”

One characteristic of cranks, quacks, and pseudoscience boosters is a love-hate relationship with science. They desperately crave the respectability and validation that science confers. In the case of medicine, they want to be seen as evidence- and science-based. On the other hand, they hate science because it just won’t given them what they want: Confirmation […]