Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Beth Israel joins the Academic Woo Aggregator!

I feel bad. I realize that I’ve been completely neglecting my Academic Woo Aggregator. You remember my Academic Woo Aggregator, don’t you? It was my attempt to compile a near-definitive list of academic medical centers that had “integrated” woo into their divisions or departments of “integrative medicine” (i.e., departments of academic-sounding quackery). Perusing it, I […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Is the earth still circling the sun?

I ask this question because I have seen something I have never seen before, something so earth-shattering that I wonder if the very axis of the earth has shifted, something so incredible that I have to pinch myself to make sure that I’m not living some unbelievably bizarre dream. I half expect the heavens to […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Another one bites the dust; Clinical trial for prostate cancer prevention by selenium and vitamin E halted

I’ve written here before about nutritional supplements. Specifically, I’ve expressed my dismay at the double standard, codified into law in 1994 in the form of the DSHEA. This particular bit of truly awful law in essence took away the power of the FDA and FTC to regulate dietary supplements, except under certain rather narrow conditions. […]

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Politics

In a surprising twist today…

…the editors of Seed Magazine have endorsed Barack Obama for President. In other news, the Pope remains Catholic, and bears have been observed relieving themselves in the woods.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

David Kirby admits that mercury in vaccines is no longer “the smoking gun”

Longtime readers of this blog know that my original exposure to antivaccination conspiracy theories first occurred in the context of the now pseudoscientific and discredited hypothesis that somehow the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that used to be used in vaccines was the cause of autism. Despite the backpedaling among antivaccination zealots such as J. […]