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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Anti-vaccine activists try out a new metaphor

If there’s one thing that the loons over at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism might actually be somewhat good at, it’s leaping on a news story and trying to liken it to their unshakable pseudoscientific belief that vaccines cause autism. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for our our amusement), the merry band of […]

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Entertainment/culture Humor Medicine Music

Why is Ozzy Osbourne still alive?

Ozzy Osbourne is, like many rock stars of his advancing age, an amazing creature. Having subjected his body to abuse beyond the ability of most normal people to understand in terms of booze, drugs, and crazy living on the road, like the Energizer Bunny he just keeps going and going and going along. Naturally, given […]

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Cancer Medicine Quackery

Natural Cancer Treatments That Work: A wretched hive of scum and quackery

Back in the 1990s when I first dipped my toe into the pool that was Usenet, that massive, wild, and untamed frontier where most online discussion occurred before the rise of the web and later the blogosphere, I was truly a naif. I had no idea–no inkling–of the depths of quackery to which people would […]

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Cancer Medicine

Cancer overdiagnosis and overtreatment revisited

I think the message may finally getting through. That message is that it’s not always the best strategy to treat cancer aggressively. Don’t get me wrong. If I have acute leukemia, I know I’ll need the big guns, every bit of chemotherapy appropriate to the disease that modern oncology can throw at it up to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Yet another one in the annals of inadvertently revealing anti-vaccine views

Time and time again, anti-vaccine activists respond to charges of being “anti-vaccine” with a self-righteous wounded whine that goes something like this: “We aren’t ‘anti-vaccine.’ We’re pro-safe vaccine.” Alternative claims are that they are “vaccine safety watchdogs” and that they’d vaccinate if only the government would “green our vaccines” or “space them out” or that […]