Jennifer Block and Elisa Albert defend the quackery and pseudoscience and quackery sold by Goop by accusing its critics of misogyny and engaging in whataboutism. It does not go well.
Category: Television
the goop lab on Netflix: Selling quackery under the guise of female “empowerment”
"the goop lab" will premiere on Netflix on January 24. It's just the latest goop vehicle to sell quackery to women under the guise of "empowerment."
Animal Planet: Showcasing acupuncture quackery at the San Diego Zoo
A recent episode of The Zoo:San Diego featured acupuncture quackery at the San Diego Zoo. But it's even worse than that. Tembo the elephant was subjected to more than just acupuncture quackery.
False balance on vaccines in Portland, courtesy of KATU and Genevieve Reaume
False balance is the bane of a science communicator's existence. KATU's Genevieve Reaume provided false balance in abundance in a story about the measles outbreak and the antivaccine movement.
Amazon, Facebook, and other streaming and social media platforms are finally cracking down on antivaccine misinformation
Over the last two weeks, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, and other social media platforms started to crackdown on the spread of antivaccine misinformation on their services. Will it be enough?
A commercial disguised as a local news report about “functional neurologist” Chris Turnpaugh
Chris Turnpaugh, a chiropractor and "functional neurologist," treated a young man with a traumatic brain injury. Did it do any good? Of course not, functional neurology is just as much quackery as any functional medicine.
Curewell: IV hydration woo on my local news station
I saw my favorite station airing an advertisement disguised as a news story for a Curewell IV HAUS, which sells IV "therapy." I did not approve.
Sharyl Attkisson is back, and she’s flogging a new-old antivaccine conspiracy theory
As a reporter with a decade-long history of credulously reporting antivaccine conspiracy theories and pseudoscience as news, Sharyl Attkisson is an old "friend" of the blog. This time, she's reporting a new-old conspiracy theory about the Autism Omnibus proceedings. I say "new-old" because she tries to mightily to produce a new version of the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement.
My Cancer Free Life: Reality docuseries as a commercial for cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski
When I first encountered Stanislaw Burzynski and the Burzynski Clinic around a decade ago, I didn’t know what to make of him. Sure, he seemed quacky, with all the testimonials of miracle cures and the claims that he cured deadly brain cancers like diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) that conventional oncology could do no more than palliate. Sure, it was rather odd that he had never done a fellowship in oncology or an oncology-related specialty. However, he was a Polish expat who seemingly was an excellent student, and he did have a brief career as a real cancer researcher at …
The University of Northern Iowa promotes facilitated communication quackery
The University of Northern Iowa is hosting a conference on facilitated communication, despite multiple warnings from academics that it's quackery and overwhelming evidence that it is the "facilitators" who are actually producing the claimed "communication" from nonverbal people and a history of producing false cases of child abuse. Why is UNI being so dangerously irresponsible?