Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Tactics and tropes of the antivaccine movement

I’ve been an observer and student of the antivaccine movement for nearly a decade now, although my intensive education began almost seven years ago, in early 2005, not long after I started blogging. It was then that I first encountered several “luminaries” of the antivaccine movement both throughout the blogosphere and sometimes even commenting on […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking Sports

“Moneyball,” politics, and science-based medicine

Regular readers probably know that I’m into more than just science, skepticism, and promoting science-based medicine (SBM). (If they’re regular readers of my other, not-so-super-secret other project, they might also realize that they’ve seen this post before elsewhere. I had to stay out late for a work-related event and decided to tart it up and […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Variations on a theme of anti-vaccine nonsense

If there’s one thing about anti-vaccine activists that is virtually their sine qua non, it’s an utter lack of understanding of science. Actually, a more accurate description would be that it’s a highly selective understanding of science. Nowhere do I find this to be the case as much as when I see anti-vaccine loons pulling […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Plausibility bias”? Try “reality bias” when it comes to clinical trials.

Last week, I pointed out that, when referring to a therapy and considering whether it should be tested in clinical trials, plausibility does not mean knowing the mechanism. Today, I intend to elaborate a bit on that. As my jumping-off point, I couldn’t ask for anything better (if you can call it that) than an […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

GAPS in a doctor’s reasoning about vaccines and autism

As hard as it is to believe, I’ve been blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense and autism quackery since early 2005. Before that, I had been a regular on the misc.health.alternative newsgroup, where I had also encountered anti-vaccine pseudoscience, but the topic had not been a top priority for me. In fact, when I started this blog […]