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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

An antivaccine mother asks for advice on Reddit about how to convince the baby’s father not to vaccinate. It doesn’t go well.

Well, I’m here. Yes, last night I arrived in Boston for the Society of Surgical Oncology meeting down at the convention center. For any skeptics who might be so inclined the Boston Skeptics are planning a meetup on Saturday, details firming up. No talk this time, but at least we can hang out for a […]

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

One more time: There’s no evidence Gardasil causes premature ovarian failure

Here we go again. When you’ve been blogging for over 11 years, particularly when what you blog about is skepticism and science-based medicine, with a special emphasis on taking down quackery (particularly cancer and antivaccine quackery), inevitably you see the same misinformation and lies pop up from time to time. Indeed, those of us in […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The Woo Boat, part 2: Andrew Wakefield versus the skeptics

About six months ago, I was highly amused to discover something called the Conspira-Sea Cruise, which I referred to at The Woo Boat. As I said at the time, file this one under the category: You can’t make stuff like this up. Certainly, I couldn’t. I’ve never been on a cruise. Quite frankly, the very […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Sh*t naturopaths say, part 3: Nobody expects the Spanish Naturopathic Inquisition!

When last I visited this topic, I was highly tempted to start out out by making a simple observation, namely by quoting John Wooden’s famous adage, “The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.” Since I didn’t use it for the two posts I did on this […]

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Biology Medicine Politics Popular culture

No, DDT won’t save us from the Zika virus

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last decade-plus of blogging about medicine and alternative medicine, it’s that any time there is an outbreak or pandemic of infectious disease, there will inevitably follow major conspiracy theories about it. It happened during the H1N1 pandemic in the 2009-2010 influenza season, the Ebola outbreak in late […]