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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking Television

Oprah and Jenny McCarthy: A woo too far

Last week I wrote a bit about what I’ve been tempted to call Oprah’s War on Science but settled for the title of a documentary called The Oprah Effect. The reason, as I have mentioned before, is that arguably there is no single person who does more to promote pseudoscientific and dubious health practices than […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking Television

Combatting the Oprah Effect

I don’t much like Oprah Winfrey. I know, I know, it’s a huge surprise to anyone who reads this blog, but there you go. Over the last four years, I’ve had numerous reasons to be unhappy with her, mainly because, as savvy a media celebrity and businesswoman as she is, she has about as close […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The anti-vaccine movement: Is it too late for scientists to bridge the gap between evidence and fear?

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s paper in Pediatrics showing that vaccine refusal elevates the risk of pertussis in a child by nearly 23-fold, a commentary in PLoS Biology asks what can be done to combat anti-vaccine misinformation. Entitled A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars, it’s an interview with a professor of medical […]

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Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Religion

Guilty, guilty, guilty: The mother who relied on prayer instead of medicine for her child

About a year ago in Wisconsin, an 11-year-old girl named Madeleine Neumann died of diabetic ketoacidosis thanks of the irrational religious beliefs of her parents, who prayed for her but did not take her to a physician even as Madeleine became weaker and more ill, her deterioration leading to a most unpleasant death. Highly unusual […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

When testimonials attack

As you may have noticed if you’ve been paying attention to the comments over the last few days, you may have noticed that we’ve had a bit of an infiltration of believers in “alternative cancer cures” (or, as I will abbreviate them, ACCs). The main focus of the infiltration appears to be in this post […]