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

“There must be a reason”

For a change of pace, I want to step back from medicine for this post, although, as you will see (I hope), the study I’m going to discuss has a great deal of relevance to the topics covered regularly on this blog. One of the most frustrating aspects of being a skeptic and championing critical […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

The SickKids Foundation supports woo

It really and truly saddens me to have to do this. The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto is one of the finest children’s hospitals there is. Unfortunately, as I documented yesterday, the hospital has, either knowingly or unknowingly, lent its good name to the metastasis of the quackfest known as Autism One from its […]

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

In which Orac defends Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum…

I realize that I’m possibly stepping into proverbial lion’s den with this one, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

It’s so cute when anti-vaxers try to discuss epidemiology…

The anti-vaccine movement is nothing if not plastic. It “evolves” very rapidly in response to selective pressures applied to it in the form of science refuting its key beliefs. For instance, when multiple studies looking at the MMR vaccine and autism failed to confirm the myth that the MMR causes autism or “autistic enterocolitis,” most […]

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Cancer Medicine Politics

Blowing smoke over secondhand smoke

I’m currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I’ll even be on a panel! While I’m gone, I’ll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I’m away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I’ll be reposting some Classic Insolence […]