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

Elsevier to Medical Hypotheses editor Bruce Charlton: Enough is enough

These days, I’m having a love-hate relationship with Elsevier. On the one hand, there are lots of reasons to hate Elsevier. For example, Elsevier took payments from Merck, Sharp & Dohme in order to publish in essence a fake journal designed to promote its products, and then got caught doing it again. On the other […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Dismissed!

Well, that didn’t take long. Remember when the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, decided that she would try to harass, intimidate, and silence Paul Offit through the filing of a frivolous libel suit against Dr. Offit, Amy Wallace (the journalist who interviewed Offit for an excellent article last year), and Condé […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Jenny McCarthy drives the stupidity to ever higher levels on–where else?–The Huffington Post

Way back on May 25, 2005, I first noticed something about a certain political group blog. It was something unsavory, something vile, something pseudoscientific. It was the fetid stench of quackery, but not just any quackery. It was anti-vaccine quackery, and the blog was Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post, where a mere 16 days after its […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Taking a vaccine injury case to the Supreme Court

I haven’t written much about this before, at least not in this context, but vaccine scares are nothing new, nor is execrably fear mongering journalism about vaccines. Those of you who read Paul Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets or Arthur Allen’s Vaccine probably know about a particularly egregious example of both that occurred in the early […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Suing DAN! practitioners for malpractice: It’s about time

Now that’s what I’m talking about! This is what we need to see more of! A father whose child underwent the quackery that is the Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) protocol is suing the doctors who administered it for malpractice: The father of a 7-year-old Chicago boy who was diagnosed as a toddler with autism has […]