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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Television

The best snark at Oprah Winfrey…

…comes, from of all places, Gawker: Oh, good, Oprah is going to give Jenny McCarthy a talk show, because she wants your kid to die of the measles. McCarthy, a famous celebrity from the long-defunct Playboy magazine and much missed MTV channel, has been on a crusade to find an evildoer responsible for her son’s […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery Television

Proof that Oprah Winfrey is utterly beyond redemption…

Ugh. Double ugh. Sitting in my e-mail in box this morning were lots of your e-mails warning me about a bit of news that shows definitively that Oprah Winfrey is beyond redemption, at least when it comes to any sort of medicine or science (not nice, given that I hadn’t even had my morning coffee […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

What to do about the Huffington Post’s support for anti-vaccine nonsense and quackery?

I’ve been complaining about the antivaccine lunacy at The Huffington Post for a very long time–since a mere two or three weeks after The Huffington Post first came into existence, when it had already become apparent that, in terms of health coverage, HuffPo was nothing more than Arianna’s Happy Home for Loony Antivaccinationists. Lately, I’ve […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Movies Popular culture Television

Fire Marshal Bill discusses vaccines and autism on The Huffington Post

After writing about a new low of pseudoscience published in that repository of all things antivaccine and quackery, The Huffington Post (do you even have to ask?), on Tuesday, I had hoped–really hoped–that I could ignore HuffPo for a while. After all, there’s only so much stupid that even Orac can tolerate before his logic […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A mathematical model for the persistence of quackery

I’m sure it’s obvious that I’m often puzzled (and, I daresay, many other skeptics and boosters of science- and evidence-based medicine are puzzled too) over why various forms of quackery and woo that have either about as close to zero prior probability as one can imagine and/or (more frequently “and”) have failed to show evidence […]