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Bioethics Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Religion

Daniel Hauser, fundraising, and “health freedom”

Today is a very good day indeed. I say that because Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin’s lymphoma who ran away with his mother to avoid having to undergo chemotherapy ordered by a judge, who had found that his parents were engaging in medical neglect in not getting him effective treatment, and returned on […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Computers and social media Entertainment/culture Humor Medicine Quackery Television

A badge of honor

I’m a bit envious of Dawn Crawford. Why am I envious? She has a badge of honor I have yet to obtain. Jenny McCarthy has blocked her on Twitter. Darn. I’m going to have to see if I can get Jenny to block me too.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The anti-vaccine movement: Is it too late for scientists to bridge the gap between evidence and fear?

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s paper in Pediatrics showing that vaccine refusal elevates the risk of pertussis in a child by nearly 23-fold, a commentary in PLoS Biology asks what can be done to combat anti-vaccine misinformation. Entitled A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars, it’s an interview with a professor of medical […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Politics

One more time: Vaccine refusal endangers children

One of the claims of the anti-vaccine movement that most irks me is that their actions do not risk harm to anyone other than their own unvaccinated children. Given that vaccination against many infectious diseases also depends on the concept of herd immunity to provide protection to members of the population who either cannot be […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Religion Science

Good news for Daniel Hauser!

I’ve been writing a lot about the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin’s lymphoma who underwent one course of chemotherapy and then decided he wanted to pursue “alternative therapy” based on fear of chemotherapy and the faux Native American religion that his mother had taken up with. Ultimately, after a judge ordered […]