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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

In which Orac defends Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum…

I realize that I’m possibly stepping into proverbial lion’s den with this one, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Autism quackery at the University of Toronto? Say it ain’t so!

Geez, I wonder if Larry Moran knows about this. If he doesn’t, I’m going to make sure that he does. I’m also guessing that he won’t be pleased. He doesn’t like pseudoscience at all. He detests “intelligent design” creationists. Based on that, I’m guessing that he won’t like it at all to learn that the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Bad, bad, bad autism advice in the Washington Post

I must admit that I’ve never heard of Margerite Kelly. Apparently she’s some sort of advice columnist for the Washington Post. Apparently she’s also fairly clueless, if her column from last Friday is any indication. At least, she’s clueless about autism. In her column Diagnosing Autism Is Never an Easy Process, she betrays a whole […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The World Health Organization disses homeopathy

If there’s one form of pseudoscientific health care (if you can call it that) that rests on the most risibly implausible tenets, I’d have to say that it’s homeopathy. Either that, or homeopathy and various “energy medicine” modalities would have to fight it out in a no woo barred cage match to the death for […]

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Clinical trials Medicine Politics Religion Science Surgery

Francis Collins’ “Five Themes” for the NIH

One of the advantages of hanging out around home on the proverbial staycation is that, instead of actually paying more attention to the news, I’ve paid less attention to the news. That’s why I didn’t notice some stories from earlier this week about what the new director of the NIH, Francis Collins, plans to do. […]