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Antivaccine nonsense Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Medicine Personal

The consequences of blogging under one’s own name

Sadly, a crank has silenced another skeptic. Many of you may know EpiRen, which is the Twitter and blog handle (and sometimes commenting handle here) of René Najera. René is an epidemiologist employed by the state public health department of health of an East Coast state and has been a force for reality- and science-based […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

The Yale Journal of Medicine & Law blows it big time on alternative medicine

It’s always frightening when lawyers delve into the realm of medicine. It’s even worse when pre-law students and political science majors do the same. Such was the thought running through my mind when I came across the most recent issue of the Yale Journal of Medicine & Law. The result is what I would most […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Clinical trials Medicine

Better late than never: The Dunning-Kruger effect meets an incompetent anti-vaccine “analysis”

It never ceases to amaze me just how ignorant of very basic principles of science anti-vaccine activists often are. I mean, seriously. Every time they try to post something, whether they know it or not, they end up making themselves look so very, very stupid–or at least ignorant. The Dunning-Kruger effect takes over, and people […]

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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 Medicine

The mercury zombie rises again…this time, in the grandchildren of Pink disease (infantile acrodynia) sufferers

Here we go again. Starting sometime in 2007, back when the idea that mercury in vaccines was the cause of the “autism epidemic” of the late 1990s and into the new century, I started referring to the “mercury/autism” hypothesis as being dead, dead, dead, as in pining for the fjords dead. Then, depending on what […]