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

Antivaccine activists rally around “Dr. Bob” Sears. Hilarity ensues.

As regular readers know, last Friday I was quite happy to relay the news that the Medical Board of California had finally acted against a rock star among the antivaccine movement, namely pediatrician “Dr. Bob” Sears. Dr. Sears (or Dr. Bob, as he likes to be called) rocketed to prominence among the vaccine-averse and downright […]

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

A “professor” who isn’t talks science about vaccines that isn’t

One of the great things about having achieved some notoriety as a blogger is that readers send me links to articles that the believe will be interesting to me. They usually come in waves. For instance, after anything having to do with Stanislaw Burzynski, “right to try,” particularly egregious antivaccine idiocy, and the like hits […]

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

“Vaccine exceptionalism”: With friends like these, who needs enemies?

There’s an old saying that basically asks the question, “With friends like these, who needs enemies? or, as Voltaire (or Marshal Villars, depending on the account) said, “May God defend me from my friends: I can defend myself from my enemies.” The point, of course, is that friends or allies can sometimes be as infuriating […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

The “big idea” behind integrative medicine is not so big at all…

I’ve frequently referred to “integrative medicine” as the “integration” of quackery with conventional, science-based medicine for the very good reason that that’s what it really is. However, advocates of medicine not based in science are nothing if not masters of marketing, which is how, over the course of three decades or so, “alternative medicine” morphed […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Quackery expands in the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

I’ve been writing about this topic so long—ever since the very beginning of this blog—that it seems as though I’ve always been doing it even though this blog has been in existence only 11 years and I didn’t really come to appreciate the problem until after I had started this blog. No, I’m not referring […]