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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

CAM usage and vaccination status

I’ve often discussed how potentially misleading anecdotal evidence and experience can be. Indeed, I’ve managed to get into quite a few–shall we say?–heated discussions with a certain woo-friendly pediatrician, who, so confident in his own clinical judgment, just can’t accept that his own personal clinical observations could be wrong or even horribly mislead him. Sadly, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Thanks, Dr. Oppel, we need to see a lot more of this

If there’s been a theme running through this blog, it’s been the importance of science and critical thinking. The main focus of this emphasis on skepticism, of course, has been medicine, which makes sense, given that I’m a doctor and a cancer researcher, but I don’t limit myself to just medicine. However, as part of […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

The SickKids Foundation supports woo

It really and truly saddens me to have to do this. The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto is one of the finest children’s hospitals there is. Unfortunately, as I documented yesterday, the hospital has, either knowingly or unknowingly, lent its good name to the metastasis of the quackfest known as Autism One from its […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Don’t listen to these “medical voices,” or: How did I miss this loony antivaccine site before?

Let’s face it, I’ve been at this “anti-antii-vax” thing for quite a while now. This December, this blog will have been in existence for five years. Even before that cold, gray Saturday afternoon nearly five years ago when, on a whim, I started up a blog on Blogspot that became the first incarnation of Respectful […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Senator Tom Harkin’s and Representative Darrell Issa’s war on medical science

In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall (a.k.a. The SkepDoc) likes to call “tooth fairy science,” where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine […]