Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

TruthKings: Not so truthful about vaccines

When I wrote about a systematic review of the medical literature regarding measles and pertussis outbreaks that demonstrated quite convincingly that, for these two diseases at least, the nonmedical exemptions and vaccine refusal endanger everyone, not just the unvaccinated, I was rather disappointed. I was rather disappointed because, although the article had been in press […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Homeopathy for autism? That’s certainly not thinking!

I write about homeopathy fairly regularly on this blog because there is no quackery that is (1) so obviously quackery and (2) such a perfect topic to use to illustrate a lot of issues relevant to medical science, such as issues in clinical trials resulting in false positives and, of course, placebo effects. Basically, homeopathy […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

An antivaccine mother asks for advice on Reddit about how to convince the baby’s father not to vaccinate. It doesn’t go well.

Well, I’m here. Yes, last night I arrived in Boston for the Society of Surgical Oncology meeting down at the convention center. For any skeptics who might be so inclined the Boston Skeptics are planning a meetup on Saturday, details firming up. No talk this time, but at least we can hang out for a […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

One more time: There’s no evidence Gardasil causes premature ovarian failure

Here we go again. When you’ve been blogging for over 11 years, particularly when what you blog about is skepticism and science-based medicine, with a special emphasis on taking down quackery (particularly cancer and antivaccine quackery), inevitably you see the same misinformation and lies pop up from time to time. Indeed, those of us in […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

No, cell phones are not “cooking men’s sperm”

I’ve written several times over the years about the overblown claims of harm attributed, largely—but not exclusively—by cranks, to cell phone radiation. It’s been claimed that radiation from cell phones can cause brain tumors (there’s no convincing evidence that this is true), breast cancer (the evidence for these claims is so incredibly flimsy—and featured by […]