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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science Surgery

Some monkey business in autism research, 2009 edition

As you may have noticed, I’ve fallen into a groove (or, depending on your point of view, a rut) writing about anti-vaccine lunacy. The reason is simple. While I was busy going nuts over Bill Maher’s receiving the Richard Dawkins Award, the anti-vaccine movement has been busy, and there are some things I need to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery Religion Science Television

My last entry for a long time on the Maher issue (I hope), plus a little history

I hadn’t planned on writing much, if anything more, about the whole Bill Maher debacle, but PZ has shown up in my comments and graciously tried to explain what’s going on at the AAI convention regarding the truly awful choice of Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award: Look, I don’t know what else I […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

A tale of two news stories: The HPV and flu vaccines and why it’s so easy to confuse correlation with causation

And so it begins. Well, it hasn’t really just begun. In fact, it’s been going on a long time. I’m talking about confusing correlation with causation when it comes to vaccines. For example, the “vaccines cause autism” variety of the anti-vaccine movement blatantly confuses the correlation with the beginning of the increase in autism diagnoses […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Adam “Dreamhealer” and science: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I wil probably lose some respect from some of my readers by admitting this, but I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Dan Brown novels. I actually enjoyed The Da Vinci Code immensely as a jolly good read, as long as you’re not too much of a stickler for anything resembling historical […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

CAM usage and vaccination status

I’ve often discussed how potentially misleading anecdotal evidence and experience can be. Indeed, I’ve managed to get into quite a few–shall we say?–heated discussions with a certain woo-friendly pediatrician, who, so confident in his own clinical judgment, just can’t accept that his own personal clinical observations could be wrong or even horribly mislead him. Sadly, […]