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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture History Homeopathy Humor Medicine Naturopathy Paranormal Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The Woo Boat

File this one under the category: You can’t make stuff like this up. (At least, I can’t.) Let’s say you’re a die hard all-conspiracy conspiracy theorist and alternative medicine believer (a not uncommon combination). You love Alex Jones and Mike Adams and agree with their rants that there is a New World Order trying to […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion

The Kenyan Catholic Bishops are at it again, this time spreading fear of the polio vaccine

There’s a delightful meme going around Facebook right now, featured above, that portrays five African women, fists raised, all wearing aprons proclaiming “Kick out polio!” Accompanying the meme is a message from the American Academy of Pediatrics celebrating that yesterday marked one full year since the last case of polio was recorded on the continent […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

12 lies about “12 mainstream vaccine lies” refuted

Listicles. I hate Listicles. I don’t do them. Yet, as much as I hate them, I can’t deny that in this brave new world of click bait, listicles bring the clicks, which is why so many blogs and websites post them. Indeed, there’s a website, Thrillist, that is dedicated to pretty much nothing but listicles. […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

“CDC whistleblower” William Thompson appears to have turned antivaccine

Here we go yet again. I’m half tempted to use a YouTube clip of Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part 3, where he says, “Just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in.” I’ll restrain myself this time. Instead, I’ll just tell you what I’m talking about, which is the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

On teaching pseudoscientific controversies in universities…

About a month ago, a number of news stories were published reporting that the University of Toronto had offered a course in alternative medicine taught by a homeopath named Beth Laundau-Halpern that presented a segment that was clearly highly biased towards antivaccine pseudoscience. It was worse than that, though, because this homeopathy just happened to […]