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Medicine

How is the cell phone-cancer myth like Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th slasher flicks?

There are certain myths that are frustratingly resistant to evidence, science, and reason. Some of these are basically medical conspiracy theories, where someone (industry and/or big pharma and/or physicians and/or the government) has slam-dunk evidence for harm but conspires to keep it from you, the people. For example, despite decades worth of negative studies, the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Music Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Antivaccine cranks ask: Did the flu vaccine kill Prince?

I heard the news yesterday morning. I was in clinic seeing patients. It was a bit of a slow morning; there was time between patients. So I spent it, as is my wont when clinic is a bit slow, signing charts (OK, signing off on charts in the electronic medical record; I haven’t actually physically […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies Popular culture Quackery

After “Vaxxed,” here comes another antivaccine “documentary”

Now that I’ve dispensed with Mike Adams’ attacks (for now), It’s time to get back to business as usual. No way am I going to let Adams interfere with the business of this blog for more than one day to take note of it, even though he’s now gone basically batshit crazy. Unfortunately, no sooner […]

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

Raging Bullsh*t: Robert De Niro is the latest celebrity antivaccinationist to spew pseudoscientific nonsense to the world

Celebrities who support pseudoscience and quackery are worse than regular, run-of-the-mill believers because they have a much larger soapbox than any of us do. I have a pretty healthy blog traffic for a medical blog, but even I don’t reach more than maybe 10,000 people a day. Even at my not-so-super-secret other blog, we only […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

In which antivaccine activist J. B. Handley thinks attacking Andrew Wakefield’s movie “backfired”

Nearly two weeks ago, a story that I had been blogging about almost nonstop for a week reached its conclusion when Robert De Niro decided to pull the antivaccine movie Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe from the Tribeca Film Festival, of which he was one of the co-founders. Before that, he had revealed that it […]