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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

J.B. Handley: Attacking the AAP over vaccines…again

I may have taken a break yesterday, but that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned my mission to make this Vaccine Awareness Week (or, more properly, the Anti-vaccine Movement Awareness Week, dedicated to countering the lies of the anti-vaccine movement). Even though it was good to take a day off, the anti-vaccine movement rarely takes a day […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Biology Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The strange science and ethics of the anti-vaccine movement

One of the great things about having declared Vaccine Awareness Week is that it gives me a convenient excuse to revisit topics and blog posts that I had meant to address but that somehow didn’t make the cut the first time around. This is the sort of thing that happens fairly frequently in blogging, where […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

What does it mean to be “anti-vaccine”?

What does “anti-vaccine” really mean? Orac attempts to explain.

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

What’s in a placebo? Mike Adams certainly doesn’t know.

If there’s one thing that confounds advocates of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), it’s the placebo effect. That’s because, whenever most such remedies are studied using rigorous clinical trial design using properly constituted placebo controls, they almost always end up showing effects no greater than placebo effects. That’s the main reason why they frequently […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion

A fallacy-laden attack on science-based medicine, revisited

On Monday I took a blogger by the name of Dr. Marya Zilberberg to task for firing a series of profoundly anti-scientific broadsides against science-based medicine (SBM). Although I did not attack Dr. Zilberberg personally, I was quite harsh in my characterization of her attacks, because, well, they were quite bad, full of straw men, […]