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Announcements Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Humor Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Déjà vu all over again, or: Orac goes, “D’oh!”

I don’t know if other bloggers out there have experienced anything like this, but I’ve experienced this a few times since starting this blog. Last night I started writing about an article that—or so I thought— was the perfect distillation of the message of the NCCIH and its desire to co-opt nonpharmacological treatments for pain […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Schadenfreude: At the FDA, it looks as though Donald Trump is about to sorely disappoint his antivaccine supporters

I’ve seen it noted that our new President-Elect seems to be selecting his cabinet officers and directors of federal bureaucracies based on how much they oppose the mission of the department they are supposed to head. For instance, to head the Department of Health and Human Services, he picked an orthopedic surgeon who belongs to […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Scientists against science denialism and pseudoscience

I wasn’t always a skeptic. Maybe I should rephrase that. I’ve probably always been a skeptic since a young age. It’s just that I didn’t start self-identifying as one until around 1998 or so. Oddly enough, my “gateway drug” into more organized skepticism was refuting Holocaust denial. I’ve told the tale on multiple occasions before, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Music Popular culture Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Poppa was a Rolling Stone…who likes homeopathy?

Old fart that I am, I’ve been a fan of The Rolling Stones since the mid-1970s, when I was in junior high school. Over the years, I’ve accumulated pretty close to all of their studio albums—and even bought multiple remastered versions of classics like Exile on Main Street and Beggar’s Banquet—and got access to the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Donald Trump is not a “slow vaxer.” He is an antivaxer.

If there’s one thing about the reporting of the 2016 election that irritated me, it was the massive underreporting of certain antiscience views held by the man who is now our President-Elect. Sure, there was coverage about his denial of anthropogenic climate change from time to time. Much less reported was his long history of […]