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

Some monkey business in autism research (or, why it is not a good idea to provoke Orac)

Believe it or not, even I, Orac, sometimes get tired of blogging about antivaccination idiocy. Indeed, this week was just such a time. I hope you can’t blame me. After all, the last few months have been so chock-full of some of the most bizarre and annoying antics of antivaccinationists at such a frequent clip […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

They don’t call it “cheat-lation” for nothing

Regular readers here are probably most familiar with the so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” therapy known as chelation therapy in the context of its use, or, more specifically, its misuse in “treating” autistic children, a misuse that has resulted in at least one death, a five-year-old autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama. However, before the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A high tech form of the same old “detoxification” woo

“Detoxification.” Whenever I hear that term, I’m at least 90% certain that I’m dealing with seriously unscientific woo. The reason should be obvious to longtime readers of this blog or to anyone who has followed “alternative medicine” for a while, because “detoxification” is a mainstay of “alternative” treatments and quackery for such a wide variety […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants

Last week’s woo was pretty darned hard to top, don’t you think? It had it all, after all: Boner potentiation, penis enlargement, magnets, near infrared, and more. The only thing it lacked that would have made it absolutely perfect woo were references to pseudoscientific “vibration” or, even better, quantum theory. That’s the reason I could […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

When popularity outpaces science in surgery

In science- and evidence-based medicine, the evaluation of surgical procedures represents a unique challenge that is qualitatively different from the challenges in medical specialties. Perhaps the most daunting of these challenges is that it is often either logistically impossible or unethical to do the gold-standard clinical trial, a double-blind, randomized placebo trial, to test the […]