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

How do we resist the rising tide of antiscience and pseudoscience?

The impetus for the creation of this blog, lo these 12+ years ago, was growing alarm at the rising tide of pseudoscience then, such as quackery, antivaccine misinformation, creationism, Holocaust denial, and many other forms of attacks on science, history, and reality itself. I had cut my teeth on deconstructing such antiscience and pseudoscience on […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The American College of Physicians integrates quackery with medicine in its recommendations for managing back pain

One of the overarching themes of this blog, if not the overarching theme, is to expose and combat the infiltration of quackery into medicine. What I’m referring to, of course, is the phenomenon that’s risen over the last 25 years or so in which various pseudoscientific alternative medicine therapies (but I repeat myself) have found […]

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Clinical trials Medicine Politics Science Skepticism/critical thinking

What if, rather than being too stringent about drug approval, the FDA is not being stringent enough?

All of the candidates being considered by President Trump for FDA Commissioner believe that the FDA is too strict in its standards for approving new drugs. In a commentary in Nature last week, two bioethicists argued that, at least in terms of preclinical data, the standard of evidence is actually too low. Which is correct?

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

A co-author of an antivax study attacks Orac for criticizing it. Hilarity ensues

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, people.

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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, […]