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Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

The Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health: Exaggerating the evidence for acupuncture to make it appear to be more than an elaborate placebo

The Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health is a group dedicated to promoting “integrative medicine” in medical academia that has, unfortunately, been very successful over the last two decades. Recently, it published a report that promotes acupuncture as a tool to combat the opioid epidemic Let’s just put it this way. The ACIMH exaggerates the evidence rather obviously.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery

No, antivaccine quack Mark Geier has not been exonerated, but the Maryland Board of Physicians appears to have screwed up

Autism quack Dr. Mark Geier recently won a $2.5 million judgment against the Maryland Board of Physicians for having violated his medical privacy by including the name of a drug he was taking in a public cease-and-desist order. Antivaxers are trying to spin this as some sort of vindication of his antivaccine quackery. Make no mistake, the board appears to have screwed up, but that has nothing to do with whether its revocation of Geier’s medical license was justified.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Movies Popular culture Television

Who cares what celebrities think about vaccines?

Parents Magazine published an article in which it listed what various celebrity moms think of vaccines. Unfortunately, it was an example of false equivalence. Indeed, it was one of the worst examples of false equivalence I’ve ever seen.

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Clinical trials Integrative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Quackademic medicine triumphant (yet again): A defense of acupuncture on the Harvard Health Blog that misses the point

If you want yet another piece of evidence that quackademic medicine, where once science-based medical schools embrace quackery, is triumphant, is needed, look no further than a fallacy-filled blog post on the Harvard Health Blog in defense of acupuncture.

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Movies Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery

In Goop Health: An even quackier quackfest of dangerous misinformation than expected

Science advocate and Goop critic Dr. Jen Gunter managed to infiltrate Gwyneth Paltrow’s quackfest In Goop Health by hiding in plain sight. (Actually, she just bought a ticket and attended.) What she found was a wretched hive of scum and quackery, plus a psychic who claims that death is not real. In addition to the nonsense, there was a dark side, as well,with quacks promoting the idea that you can cure cancer with thought alone and don’t need medication to treat depression.