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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A cancer quackery I had never heard of before?

After having blogged about cancer quackery for more than four years and having spent at least five years before that on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative seeing virtually all manner of quackery, cancer and otherwise, I thought I had seen it all. Indeed, I thought that there was no form of cancer quackery that I hadn’t […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Biology Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Melanie Phillips: Crank magnetism in action on evolution and vaccines

A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Homeopathy kills a child

Homeopathy is water. Homeopaths will tell you otherwise. They will tell you that water “memory,” which, the way they describe it is some mystical property whereby it “remembers” the remedy with which it’s been in contact, even though the substance (whatever it was) has been diluted far beyond the point where there’s likely to be […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Medicine

When big pharma pays a publisher to publish a fake journal…

It’s times like these when I’m happy that I haven’t published in too many Elsevier Journals during the course of my career. I say that because on Thursday, it was revealed that pharmaceutical company Merck, Sharp & Dohme paid Elsevier to produce a fake medical journal that, to any superficial examination, looked like a real […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Humor Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The Emperor of the Woo-niverse

Ever since I started this little vanity bit known as Your Friday Dose of Woo, lo, these nearly three years ago, when I introduced the waiting blogosphere to the woo-tastic quantum homeopathic stylings of Lionel Milgrom, I’ve occasionally wondered if I had started out with too much woo. I mean, Milgrom is a really hard […]