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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Surveying the “integrative medicine” landscape

Perhaps the biggest bête noire for me is the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers; so whenever I see particularly egregious examples, it gets my fingers twitching over the keyboard, ready to lay down some not-so-Respectful Insolence. So it was last Friday when I happened across an article published nearly two years ago […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Orac’s mail bag: Quacks do better than medicine!

We get hate mail. Or I do. True, I don’t get an inordinate amount of hate mail, but I do get some. A lot of the time, it’s rather boring and predictable, which is why I don’t often respond to it on the blog, although sometimes against my better judgment I respond by e-mail. That […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Religion

Praying for an anti-vaccine “advantage”?

A couple of months ago, right before TAM 9, I took note of a rather disturbing post by one of the regular bloggers on the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism. Basically, the post was worrisome because in it Kent Heckenlively portrayed those who oppose anti-vaccine pseudoscience as “wicked,” even quoting Psalm 94, which is […]

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Cancer Medicine Quackery

Does chemotherapy work or not? The “2% gambit”

“CHEMOTHERAPY KILLS!!!!” I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve come across brain-dead statements like the one above, often in all caps on websites resembling that of the Time Cube guy, quite frequently with more than one exclamation point, on the websites of “natural healers,” purveyors of “alternative medicine.” In fact, if you Google “chemotherapy […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A “disinformation campaign” against homeopathy?

Oh goody. Goody, goody, goody, goody, goody. As I sat down to lay down a bit of the old ultrainsolence on a hapless bit of psuedoscience, I was near despair. For whatever reason, there didn’t appear to be anything new out there for me to sink my teeth into. True, when this has happened in […]