When you’re in an exam room with a patient, sometimes you’re forced to contemplate uncomfortable questions.

When you’re in an exam room with a patient, sometimes you’re forced to contemplate uncomfortable questions.
There’s a little known aspect of Orac’s history that hasn’t been told for 11 years. Back in the early 1990s, when he was taking a “break” from residency to do his PhD work, he moonlighted as a helicopter flight physician. Here is one of his Tales from the Helicopter.
It takes a lot to stop Orac from applying Insolence to pseudoscience and quackery. One of the biggest windstorms in his lifetime did it. No jokes about wind.
I’ve been writing a long time about a phenomenon that I like to refer to as “quackademic medicine,” defined as the infiltration into academic medical centers and medical school of unscientific and pseudoscientific treatment modalities that are unproven or disproven. Few seem to listen. That’s why it’s reassuring to see a mainstream news publication get it (mostly) right about this phenomenon.
Antiabortion antivaccine activists like to claim that “aborted fetal cells” in vaccines mean that vaccines are contaminated products of evil. In reality, there are no “aborted fetal cells” in vaccines. A cell line derived from an aborted fetus in 1962 did, however, lead to huge advances in vaccine technology and the prevention of many millions of deaths worldwide.