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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Piltdown” medicine: Andrew Wakefield’s scientific fraud was worse than previously thought

Pity poor Andrew Wakefield. 2010 was a terrible year for him, and 2011 is starting out almost as bad. In February 2010, the General Medical Council in the U.K. recommended that Wakefield be stripped of his license to practice medicine in the U.K. because of scientific misconduct related to his infamous 1998 case series published […]

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Biology Clinical trials Evolution Medicine Physics Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Is the “decline effect” really so mysterious? (revisited)

Back in December, I took issue with a highly irritating article by someone who normally should know better, Jonah Lehrer, entitled The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With the Scientific Method?, so much so that I wrote one of my typical long-winded deconstructions of the article. One thing that irritated me was contained […]

Categories
Intelligent design/creationism Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

This guy is a veritable modern Copernicus by press release

After you’ve been blogging as long as I have, you inevitably wind up on a lot of mailing lists. Publicity companies, for instance, long ago discovered that getting a buzz going in the blogosphere is every bit as important as trying to get coverage from the “traditional” media. If you’re as fortunate as I’ve been […]

Categories
Biology Clinical trials Evolution Medicine Physics Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Is the “decline effect” really so mysterious?

NOTE: Orac was actually out rather late last night. It turns out that the more administrative responsibility he somehow seems to find the more he has to go out to dinner as a part of various cancer center-related functions. As a result, he is recycling a bit of recent material from elsewhere that he in […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

Another despicable abuse of a dead celebrity

I was originally going to switch it up and blog about something other than cancer. In fact, there is a particularly juicy bit of anti-vaccine nonsense that I wanted to write about because it shows the utter mendacity of a certain anti-vaccine website that, believe it or not, is not Age of Autism. I know, […]