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

More false “balance” on vaccines and autism

There’s so much horrible reporting on vaccines and the whole manufactroversy that promulgates the myth that vaccines somehow cause autism through a combination of confusing correlation with causation, bad science, quackery, and misrepresenting autism that it’s gotten harder for me to be sufficiently irritated to write about it. When I see yet another another example […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Quackademic Medicine at Jefferson University Hospitals

I detest the term “integrative medicine,” which is what promoters of “alternative medicine” pivoted to call “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) when they decided that they needed to lose the word “alternative” altogether. After all, no longer were CAM practitioners content to have their favorite quackery be “complementary” to real medicine because “complementary” implied a […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Special pleading for “integrative oncology”

I don’t recall how many times I’ve said lately that I detest the term “integrative medicine.” As I’ve pointed out time and time again, it’s the preferred “successor,” if you will, to the term “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) (at least among the woo-friendly). After all, as I’ve pointed out before, it just won’t do […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Using language to achieve the appearance of legitimacy for quacks

The whole concept of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) and “integrative medicine” (IM), the former of which “complements” science-based medicine with quackery and the latter of which “integrates” pseudoscience-based with science-based medicine. The reason I start out by saying this is to emphasize that CAM/IM is all about using language to persuade that pseudoscience is […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

Revisiting the question of “individualization” of treatments in “alternative” medicine

I kind of miss Peter Lipson on ScienceBlogs and wish he were still around. I realize it’s been nearly a year and a half since he departed, but it’s been a bit lonely here being the only physician blogging about quackery, the role of science in medicine, and other skeptical topics related to medicine. This […]