A new study by Jeremy Snyder and Tim Caulfield shows how much money is raised by GoFundMe and other crowdfunding sources to support quackery. It’s a lot of money, which is unsurprising to Orac, given that he’s been writing about how crowdfunding is “baked into” the business model of cancer quacks since he discovered Stanislaw Burzynski a decade ago.
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As a reporter with a decade-long history of credulously reporting antivaccine conspiracy theories and pseudoscience as news, Sharyl Attkisson is an old “friend” of the blog. This time, she’s reporting a new-old conspiracy theory about the Autism Omnibus proceedings. I say “new-old” because she tries to mightily to produce a new version of the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement.
There’s a whole genre of quack apologia for traditional Chinese medicine that I like to call “traditional Chinese medicine is science, ma-an!” Basically, it tries to convince you that the prescientific, mystical, vitalistic mass of nonsense that is traditional Chinese medicine is “ancient knowledge” that was far ahead of its time and that its wisdom will be rediscovered to become the future of medicine. It’s utter nonsense, of course. Unfortunately, in its January issue, National Geographic fell for this myth—hard.
Dr. Ken Walker (more famously known as Canadian syndicated columnist Dr. W. Gifford-Jones) wrote an antivaccine op-ed for The Toronto Sun so full of antivaccine misinformation that was retracted after a flurry of complaints and bad publicity. Now, he plays the martyr. Unfortunately for him, he does it while spewing the same sort of antivaccine misinformation for which his previous op-ed had been retracted.
For-profit stem cell clinics selling unproven and downright quacky stem cell therapies have proliferated over the last several years, with federal and state law seemingly powerless to stop them. Recently, the FDA and FTC have shown signs of acting to crack down on them. Now, the Medical Board of California is forming a task force to determine how to regulate physicians offering these unproven therapies. Will it matter?
