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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Reader e-mail: Why are you picking on Jenny McCarthy over vaccines and autism?

Last night, I received an e-mail from a fairly well-known atheist (no, it wasn’t Richard Dawkins, although that would have been totally cool) criticizing me for my post about Bill Maher’s complete unsuitability for the Richard Dawkins Award. I’m not going to reprint my response to that part, because, well, his criticisms were pretty much […]

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

Senator Tom Harkin’s and Representative Darrell Issa’s war on medical science

In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall (a.k.a. The SkepDoc) likes to call “tooth fairy science,” where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

The Huffington Post’s war on medical science is noticed

One of the advantages of having been a blogger for nearly five years is that you gain a sense of perspective after having written about various issues over and over for a long time. True, the disadvantage is that it sometimes becomes difficult to think of something new to say about longstanding issues. Even so, […]

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Autism Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Patient-led “clinical trials” versus clinical research (2012 edition)

Dying of cancer can be a horrible way to go, but as a cancer specialist I sometimes forget that there are diseases that are equally, if not more, horrible. One that always comes to mind is amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. It is a motor neuron disease whose clinical […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Orac’s mail bag: Quacks do better than medicine!

We get hate mail. Or I do. True, I don’t get an inordinate amount of hate mail, but I do get some. A lot of the time, it’s rather boring and predictable, which is why I don’t often respond to it on the blog, although sometimes against my better judgment I respond by e-mail. That […]