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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Prince George’s County Courthouse protest about vaccine scofflaws: More there than meets the eye?

There’s a rather interesting bit of vaccine politics going on in Prince George’s County, Maryland being reported by the AP and The Baltimore Sun: Scores of grumbling parents facing a threat of jail lined up at a courthouse today to either prove that their school-age kids already had their required vaccinations or see that the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

Religion and refusing medical treatment: Would you die for your religion?

This is getting depressing. Yesterday, I did a brief post on the tragic story of a nine month old baby named Gloria Thomas whose father, a homeopath, put his faith in homeopathic medicines to treat her severe eczema and who as a consequence did not receive the necessary medical treatment she needed and died of […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Dan Olmsted joins Mike Adams in abusing Breast Cancer Awareness month for his own purposes

Having gotten into the whole idea of blogging about peer-reviewed research yesterday and even using a spiffy new icon to denote that that’s what I’m doing, originally I had planned on looking up another interesting article or pulling one from my recent reading list and blogging about it. Then, realizing that Breast Cancer Awareness Month […]

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

Using religion to avoid vaccination, revisited

Whatever criticisms I may have had for prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris otherwise, one area that I’m totally down with both of them on is their criticism of the undue respect and consideration we as a society give to religious ideas. This consideration is rarely, if ever, based on the merit of […]

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

A credulous treatment of the mercury militia on PBS

The Skeptical Surfer informs me of a rather disturbing programming decision by PBS: I first caught wind of the autism film “Beautiful Son” through the surfing community. Surf filmmaker Don King has an autistic son. Being a filmmaker, Don always has a video camera at hand and has documented his “journey” of discovering that his […]