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

Repeat after me: Enforcing medical and scientific standards is not “censorship”

I don’t mean to beat up on Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick. I really don’t. I realize I rather harshly criticized him yesterday for being so hostile to the concept of “denialism,” to the point where he characterized even the use of the term as a means of “suppressing” free speech. Normally, that criticism would have been […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Harnessing the generosity of kind-hearted strangers to pay for woo

Thanks to the number of people without medical insurance, desperate patients are holding fundraisers to pay for their medical care. Increasingly, they are also increasingly turning to the Internet to raise money through crowdfunding. Unfortunately, there is a dark side to crowdfunding. Patients are also turning to it to raise money to pay for quackery.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Even more hysterical than Age of Autism?

Remember how I had a little fun with Katie Wright’s overheated rhetoric about Kathleen Sebelius’ request to the press that they not give equal weight to anti-vaccine cranks when they report about issues of vaccines? Her exact words, if you will recall, were: There are groups out there that insist that vaccines are responsible for […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Franchising autism “biomed” woo

Remember Mark and David Geier? I wouldn’t be surprised if regular readers may have forgotten about this father-son tag team of anti-vaccine lunacy and autism woo. After all, I haven’t written about them since journalist Trine Tsouderos did her expose of their “Lupron protocol” for the Chicago Tribune nine months ago. Long time readers, however, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The anti-vaccine movement strikes back against Trine Tsouderos and The Chicago Tribune

One week ago, The Chicago Tribune added yet another excellent addition to its recent series of articles exposing the dark underbelly of the anti-vaccine movement and, more importantly, the quackery that permeates the “autism biomedical” movement promoted by anti-vaccine groups such as Age of Autism. The first installment in the series, written by Tribune reporters […]