Categories
Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking Surgery

Repealing motorcycle helmet laws: Making motorcycles even more into donorcycles

It’s a seldom mentioned aspect of my professional history that I used to do a lot of trauma surgery in my youth. I did my residency at a program that included a county hospital with a busy trauma program where I saw quite a bit of vehicular carnage and an urban hospital (which has since […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies Music Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

You stay away from Ziggy Stardust and Severus Snape, Mike Adams!

I’ve been a big fan of David Bowie ever since high school. True, I didn’t appreciate his less mainstream stuff as intensely as I do now until I had been in college a couple of years, but it’s not an inaccurate to characterize the effect of David Bowie’s art on my life as significant. Basically, […]

Categories
Medicine Politics Popular culture Science Skepticism/critical thinking

“Transparency” should not equal a license to harass scientists

Kevin Folta was subject to an abusive FOIA request for his emails by US Right To Know, an anti-GMO group seeking to harass him for his advocacy for GMOs. Paul Thacker, a journalist, used those emails without pointing out the true nature of the source of the FOIA request, and has argued for an expansive view of FOIA that is basically a license for groups like USTRK to harass scientists.

Categories
Biology Medicine Physics Popular culture Science

Did "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" lead to the suicide of a teenage girl?

Blog topics seem to come in waves, where I’ll be stuck on more deeply examining a topic for days, only to have that topic dry up. Sometimes, you, my readers, make me aware of a topic. This is an example of the latter case. It’s something I had been debating about whether to blog about […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement

I originally wasn’t going to write about this particular post, but the mass shooting in San Bernardino yesterday led me to change my mind. For those of you who either aren’t in the US or were somehow cut off from media for the last 18 hours or so, yesterday a heavily armed man and woman […]