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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Springtime for Stupid, or: Beware, a wave of stupid is about to fall upon the nation. Again.

Get ready for some serious stupid, folks, stupid that threatens to engulf all reason, as a black hole engulfs all nearby matter that falls into its gravitational field. Although I knew that Jenny McCarthy was soon to release another book promoting autism quackery, I had thought it wasn’t coming out for a month or two. […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

When the outbreaks occur, they’ll start in California

I may have been deluding myself when I talked about 2009 shaping up to be a bad year for antivaccinationists. It turns out that the antivaccine movement is succeeding. That’s right, a cadre of upper middle class, scientifically illiterate parents, either full of the arrogance of ignorance or frightened by leaders of the antivaccine movement, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Popular culture Quackery

Random (deserved) swipes at Jenny McCarthy

Anyone who’s read this blog for more than a month knows my dismal opinion of Indigo woo girl, ex-Playboy Playmate, and gross-out comedienne Jenny McCarthy, who since having a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder has transformed herself from D-list celebrity to A-list, where the “A” stands for “antivaccine.” Her combination of obnoxiousness, the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion

Dr. Emoto’s water woo metastasizes

Indiana Jones had a saying: “Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?” This line was most famously delivered in Raiders of the Lost Ark after he and his friend Sallah had opened the Well of Souls and were staring down into it. Sallah noticed that the ground appeared to be moving within; so Indy shined […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Medicine

The AMA investigates Catherine DeAngelis and JAMA

Last week, there was a bit of a scandal of sorts over an editorial published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which I blogged about in a rather long post. The short version is that a flawed study that tested using Lexapro that neglected to report a rather important comparison that would […]