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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Battleground movie theaters: Skeptical activism versus the anti-vaccine movement

It figures. I’m gone for a couple of days, paying little attention to the blogosphere or the Internet, and something big has to happen. Remember a couple of weeks ago, when in the context of asking how we should respond to the anti-vaccine movement I discussed a recent campaign by the anti-vaccine group SafeMinds to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

Blaming failure to promote anti-vaccine views on “progressivism”

Every so often on this blog I get in the mood to take on a post on the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism. Over the three years of its existence, I’ve seen some truly bizarre posts, ranging from one blogger blithely discussing how he took his daughter to Costa Rica for stem cell quackery […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

The anti-vaccine movement versus the truth

My alma mater has let me down. As many of you know, I went to the University of Michigan for both my undergraduate degree and for medical school. I still have a fairly strong attachment to the school, which is why I can still be disappointed when its faculty let me down. Unfortunately, it’s happened, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Barbara Loe Fisher versus the flu vaccine

Around about this time last year, the nation, nay, the world, was in the throes of a frenzy about the H1N1 influenza pandemic. It was also fertile ground for skeptical blogging for two reasons. First, it was a major health-related story. Second, the mass vaccination campaigns for H1N1 that governments thew together hurriedly was a […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Science

The Guatemala syphilis experiment, human subjects research abuses, and CAM

If there’s one thing that burns me about so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) clinical trials, it’s how unethical many of them are. This is particularly true for trials that test modalities that, on the basic science grounds alone, can be dismissed as so highly implausible and with such a low prior probability of success […]