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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A homeopath unplugged from reality

Yesterday’s post made me sad. It always makes me sad to contemplate a 14 year old boy facing the loss of his father to an aggressive form of leukemia, as Danny Hauser is. The kid just can’t catch a break. First he himself develops Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Because he happens to live in a family that […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Religion

Another Hauser goes for “natural” medicine against a deadly disease

Around this time last year, the major topic of this blog was the case of a young teen named Daniel Hauser. In fact, right around this time last year, this particular case was approaching its climax. Hauser, as you may recall, was the 13-year-old Minnesota boy diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma who refused chemotherapy. His stated […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

The story of anti-vaccine icon Andrew Wakefield in pictures

I’ve blogged a lot about anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield over the years. The story has become long and convoluted, and to tell it takes a lot of verbiage, even by Orac standards. However, I’ve found a good resource that tells the tale of Andrew Wakefield and his misdeeds in a highly accessible form: The question […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Oh no! My cell phone’s going to kill me! (The revenge)

Here we go again. I’ve written a few times before about the controversy over whether cell phones (a.k.a. mobile phones in most of the rest of the world) cause brain cancer, concluding on more than one occasion that the evidence does not support a link. For example, there has not been a large increase in […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Humor Medicine Music

The Refusers: Proving Orac’s corollary to Poe’s Law

Over the last week or so, I’ve been a bit–shall we say?–dismissive of claims by anti-vaccinationists when they insist that, really, truly, honestly, they aren’t “anti-vaccine,” usually with a wounded, indignant, self-righteous tone. Either that, or they make like the Black Knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail by demanding the surrender of the […]