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

A Cleveland Clinic doctor’s antivaccine rant: Facilitated by a culture of pseudoscience and published with the knowledge of the Clinic’s communications office

The fallout from the social media firestorm from the antivaccine rant written by the Medical Director of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute and published by Cleveland.com last Friday has abated but far from faded away. The offending physician, Dr. Daniel Neides, was forced to issue an apology, which was one of the least convincing apologies […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

An acupuncturist attacks “pseudoskeptics” on Wikipedia. Hilarity ensues.

Back in the day, quacks and cranks liked Wikipedia. Because anyone can become an editor on Wikipedia, they assumed that they could just sign up to edit Wikipedia pages and change them to reflect their views on alternative medicine or whatever other pseudoscientific topic they believed in. When Wikipedia first emerged on the scene, I […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine History Holocaust denial Medicine Paranormal Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

2016: The year bullshit was weaponized

Conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, quackery, and belief in things that can be objectively demonstrated not to be true have always been with us. Unfortunately, 2016 was the year that this bullshit was weaponized, and we may never recover.

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

This could be the most ludicrous version of the “toxins” gambit I’ve ever seen

One of the oldest antivaccine tropes that first encountered is one that I like to call the “toxins gambit.” Basically, this is an antivaccine lie that portrays vaccines as being laden with all manner of “toxins” because they have—gasp!—chemicals with scary sounding names and even some chemicals that are toxic. The lie derives from the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Schadenfreude: At the FDA, it looks as though Donald Trump is about to sorely disappoint his antivaccine supporters

I’ve seen it noted that our new President-Elect seems to be selecting his cabinet officers and directors of federal bureaucracies based on how much they oppose the mission of the department they are supposed to head. For instance, to head the Department of Health and Human Services, he picked an orthopedic surgeon who belongs to […]