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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Quackery

AutismOne: A “Warrior Mother” and pseudoscience

One way that pseudoscience tries to maintain a patina of respectability to the outside world, a patina that sometimes even manages to take in researchers unacquainted with its methods, is through the “research conference” that has all the trappings of a research meeting but whose topics reveal the pseudoscience at the heart of it all. […]

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Clinical trials Medicine Politics Surgery

When human subjects protection stifles innovation, part II

Back in late December, I came across an op-ed piece in the New York Times written by Dr. Atul Gawande, general and endocrine surgeon and author of Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, that struck me as a travesty of what our system for protecting human […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery Television

Is Bill Maher really that ignorant? (Part III): “Oh, come on, Superman!”

You can read parts I and II first, if you like. Yet another reason Bill Maher is an idiot can be found in the video below, taken from Real Time With Bill Maher from the February 8 episode. I happened to catch it in reruns and was looking for a transcript or YouTube version. It’s […]

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Entertainment/culture Music Religion

Sunday morning lazy YouTube blogging: “Dear God,” by XTC

One of XTC’s best songs: I actually heard this on the radio the other night, hence my looking for it on YouTube. I hadn’t heard the song in several years, and I don’t recall ever hearing it on the radio. In any case, it caught my mood this morning.

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Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Medicine Quackery

Woo-hoo! The Quackometer’s back!

I recently wrote about the cowardly manner in which Netcetera booted the Quackometer off of its servers unceremoniously in response to a truly vacuous legal threat from a quack named Joseph Chikelue Obi. Now, the little black duck has found a new ISP. The Quackometer is back in business! Hilariously, “Dr.” Obi is already making […]