Categories
Autism

The Geiers try to patent chemical castration as an autism treatment

When it rains, it pours. Last week, we had the Shattuck paper; this week, I’m sucked right back into this topic, at least for today. A few weeks ago, I commented about a truly frightening direction that autism quackery was taking, with the father-son team of Mark and David Geier’s bizarre proposal that chemically castrating […]

Categories
Politics

My Bill of Rights

Maybe you’re like me, tired of a government that does not seem to respect one of the founding documents of our nation, namely the Bill of Rights. Maybe you’re tired of Christian fundamentalists who do not see the placement of monuments containing the Ten Commandments on government property as a government endorsement of a specific […]

Categories
Evolution Medicine

Medicine and evolution, Part 3: A trypanosome shows the way

Earlier this week, I wrote about how the principles of population evolution can be applied to premalignant lesions in order to predict which lesions would progress to cancer. This time around, I’d like to discuss how using evolutionary principles can provide insights to human disease that would not be as obvious or that would take […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Medicine Quackery

ProtocolKills.com revisited: Misinformed refusal turned up to 11

Back in the day, I used to refer to something I dubbed “misinformed refusal,” a term that refers to how antivaxxers had weaponized “informed consent” by inverting it to frighten parents against vaccinating. In the age of the pandemic, ProtocolKills.com generalizes misinformed refusal to all COVID-19 treatments.

Categories
Bad science Clinical trials Medicine Politics Popular culture Skepticism/critical thinking

The FDA’s emergency use authorization of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19: Dangerous politics, not science

Yesterday, the FDA issued emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroqine and chloroquine to treat COVID-19. Politics, not science, is why.