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Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Gluten-free skin and beauty products? More like thought-free…

A couple of Sundays ago (Easter, to be precise), my wife and I were sitting around yesterday reading the Sunday papers and perusing the Internet (as is frequently our wont on Sunday mornings), when I heard a contemptuous harrumph coming from her direction. She then pointed me to an article in our local newspaper entitled […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Quackery

The "Compassionate Freedom of Choice Act of 2014": Pernicious "health freedom" nonsense that degrades human research subject protections

I was torn about what to blog about today. There were lots of things floating around that caught my eye and appear worthy of of a little taste of Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, so much so that I couldn’t decide. None of them really stuck out. Then I saw this news story pop up […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Criticism of pseudoscience and quackery is not "hate speech"

I sense a new disturbance in the antivaccine force. I hadn’t planned on blogging about the antivaccine movement again, but I felt that I needed to do a follow up to yesterday’s (hopefully) amusing little takedown of the antivaccine stylings of new member of that group personification of the Dunning-Kruger effect and arrogance of ignorance, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Ad hominem and harassment: How antivaccine activists work

For some reason, I was really beat last night, and, given that this weekend is a holiday for a large proportion of the country (if, perhaps, not for a large proportion of my readership), I don’t feel too bad about slacking off a bit by mentioning a couple of short bits that I wanted to […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Patients, doctors embracing alternative medicine in battle against cancer? Not so much.

In the well over nine years that I’ve been blogging, there’s one tried and true, completely reliable topic to blog about, one that I can almost always find. I’m referring, of course, to the credulous news story about pseudoscience. The pseudoscience can be quackery, creationism, anthropogenic global warming denialist arguments, or whatever; inevitably, there will […]