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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

“Natural” versus CAM “natural”

NOTE: I was on a lovely vacation for three days in Chicago over the weekend, where I visited old haunts. (Bathroom attendants? At one of my favorite pub hangouts when I lived in Lincoln Park, John Barleycorn? Handing out crappy brown paper towels? Plastering the walls there with endless rows of flat screen TVs turned […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The infiltration of quackademic medicine metastasizes to the community

The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace, except that it’s not just quackademic medicine. Now, it goes way, way beyond that to encompass not just academic medical centers but community hospitals, hospitals of all sizes, large private hospitals, and health care institutions of all shapes and sizes. Frequently, proponents of quackademic medicine try to portray […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Bernadine Healy: Even more hooked into the anti-vaccine movement than I had thought

Well, well, well, well… I always wondered about this. As I pointed out the other day, former NIH director Bernadine Healy died of a recurrent brain tumor. As regular readers know, over the last three or four years, she had become a convert to the vaccine/autism cause, as evidenced by her having been named Age […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

R.I.P. Bernadine Healy

It came as a shock to me to find out yesterday that former director of the American Red Cross and former director of the NIH Bernadine Healy died. Chalk it up to my simply being ignorant of the fact, but I didn’t know, or had forgotten, that she had brain cancer. Interestingly, she had had […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Tell both sides” strikes again in vaccine reporting

Over the years that I’ve been following the anti-vaccine movement, I’ve become familiar with typical narratives that reporters use when reporting on the vaccine fears stirred up by anti-vaccine activists. One narrative is the “brave maverick doctor” narrative, in which an iconoclastic quack (such as Mark Geier or Andrew Wakefield, for example) is portrayed fighting […]