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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Is Sharyl Attkisson feeling the heat over her irresponsible reporting of the Alex Spourdalakis case?

Yesterday, I did a bit of navel gazing about how cranks, quacks, and antivaccinationists have a penchant for attacking skeptics at work in order to try to intimidate them into silence. Reading the post over again, I realize that it came across perhaps more whiny than it should have, but I guess I was just […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

Here we go again: The vile tactic of blaming shaken baby syndrome on vaccines, part 2

About a week ago, I wrote about something that really irritates me, namely that most despicable of antivaccine claims, which is that shaken baby syndrome is somehow a misdiagnosis for vaccine injury. It is a claim that, as far as I can recall, began when, for reasons that have continued to elude me more than […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Sharyl Attkisson and CBS News: Lying by omission about the murder of autistic teen Alex Spourdalakis

The damaged done by the antivaccine movement is primarily in how it frightens parents out of vaccinating using classic denialist tactics of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). Indeed, as has been pointed out many times before, antivaccinationists are often proud of their success in discouraging parents from vaccinating, with one leader of the antivaccine […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

The future of "integrative medicine" is now, unfortunately

I was depressed yesterday. I’ve been on vacation this week (staycation, actually, as I stayed at home and didn’t go on any trips); so you would think it would take a lot to depress me. It did. Scott Gavura over at Science-Based Medicine wrote about how another once-proud academic medical center, the University of Toronto, […]

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Cancer

A cancer quackfest

Oh, goody. I think I see future blog fodder for the second half of September. (When you’ve been in the blogging biz as along as I have, you think that far in advance when the opportunity presents itself.) Well, maybe it’s blog fodder. The problem is that I would actually have to wade through the […]