Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Bernadine Healy: Flirting with the anti-vaccine movement

There’s an old saying, so old that it’s devolved into cliché: Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it. I’m sure the vast majority of my readers, if not every last one of them, have heard this saying before. Certainly, it has a lot of truth to it. Sometimes it even applies […]

Categories
Skepticism/critical thinking

Why projection isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I pointed out that, in addition to its usual stable of antivaccine pseudoscience and the quantum woo of Deepak Chopra, that The Huffington Post had now delved even beyond what I thought it would by publishing the nonsensical, credulous blather about distant healing? In the post Srinivasan Pillay, […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Popular culture Quackery Television

Farrah Fawcett, anal cancer, and “alternative medicine cancer cures”

Note the followup post to this one, in which Orac admits error. You just have to read it, given how rarely Orac messes up when speculating… Our cancer center has a large, open area interspersed with patient waiting areas, one of which is the clinic where I see patients, that I frequently must traverse to […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

More woo on–where else?–The Huffington Post

It just never ends. Four years ago, I was one of the very first bloggers to notice that the then-new liberal blog The Huffington Post was from its very inception a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Jay Gordon, Deirde Imus, all the luminaries of the antivaccine movement were there […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

On “open-mindedness”

One of the most common refrains from advocates of pseudoscientific and paranormal ideas is that critics are “close-minded,” that they reject out of hand any idea that does not fit within their world view. Of course, this is a canard, given that science thrives on the open and free exchange of ideas, and it is […]