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

Repeat after me: Enforcing medical and scientific standards is not “censorship”

I don’t mean to beat up on Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick. I really don’t. I realize I rather harshly criticized him yesterday for being so hostile to the concept of “denialism,” to the point where he characterized even the use of the term as a means of “suppressing” free speech. Normally, that criticism would have been […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Are one person’s iconoclastic views another person’s denialism?

I’ve had a lot of fun thus far this week expressing more than a bit of schadenfreude over Andrew Wakefield’s being ignominiously stripped of his medical license in the U.K. by the General Medical Council, not to mention pointing out the quackfest that is Autism One, I feel the need for a brief break from […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

No difference between “too many too soon” and “too few too late” when it comes to vaccines

Regular readers know that I have a tendency every so often to whine about when writing about the antics of the anti-vaccine movement seems to engulf this blog. Yes, it’s true. Every so often I get really, really tired of the bad science, pseudoscience, magical thinking, misinformation, and even outright lies that emanate from various […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Politics Quackery

Andrew Wakefield: Struck off!

It’s been a long time comin’ It’s goin’ to be a Long Time Gone. And it appears to be a long, appears to be a long, appears to be a long time, yes, a long, long, long ,long time before the dawn. – from “Long Time Gone” by Crosby, Stills & Nash Oh, happy day! […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A homeopath unplugged from reality

Yesterday’s post made me sad. It always makes me sad to contemplate a 14 year old boy facing the loss of his father to an aggressive form of leukemia, as Danny Hauser is. The kid just can’t catch a break. First he himself develops Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Because he happens to live in a family that […]