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Clinical trials Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Scientific fraud and journal article retractions

A week ago, I took someone who has normally been a hero of mine, Brian Deer, to task for what I considered to be a seriously cheap shot at scientists based on no hard data, at least no hard data that he bothered to present. To make a long, Orac-ian magnum opus short, Deer advocated […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The infiltration of quackademic medicine metastasizes to the community

The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace, except that it’s not just quackademic medicine. Now, it goes way, way beyond that to encompass not just academic medical centers but community hospitals, hospitals of all sizes, large private hospitals, and health care institutions of all shapes and sizes. Frequently, proponents of quackademic medicine try to portray […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

R.I.P. Bernadine Healy

It came as a shock to me to find out yesterday that former director of the American Red Cross and former director of the NIH Bernadine Healy died. Chalk it up to my simply being ignorant of the fact, but I didn’t know, or had forgotten, that she had brain cancer. Interestingly, she had had […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Tell both sides” strikes again in vaccine reporting

Over the years that I’ve been following the anti-vaccine movement, I’ve become familiar with typical narratives that reporters use when reporting on the vaccine fears stirred up by anti-vaccine activists. One narrative is the “brave maverick doctor” narrative, in which an iconoclastic quack (such as Mark Geier or Andrew Wakefield, for example) is portrayed fighting […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

In which I disagree with Brian Deer on the issue of how to deal with scientific fraud

I admire Brian Deer. I really do. He’s put up with incredible amounts of abuse and gone to amazing lengths to unmask the vaccine quack Andrew Wakefield, the man whose fraudulent case series published in The Lancet thirteen years ago launched a thousand quack autism remedies and, worst of all, contributed to a scare over […]