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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Homeopathy for autism? That’s certainly not thinking!

I write about homeopathy fairly regularly on this blog because there is no quackery that is (1) so obviously quackery and (2) such a perfect topic to use to illustrate a lot of issues relevant to medical science, such as issues in clinical trials resulting in false positives and, of course, placebo effects. Basically, homeopathy […]

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

Autism quackery: Try, try, try, and never give up

Antivaccine quackery is arguably one of the worst forms of quackery. First, the pseudoscientific beliefs undergirding such quackery are based on the fear and demonization of one of the greatest medical advances in the history of the human race, the result of which are children left unprotected against preventable diseases that routinely used to populate […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Measles outbreaks and the debate over how far we should go requiring vaccination

Whenever we discuss vaccines and vaccine hesitancy, thanks to Andrew Wakefield the one vaccine that almost always comes up is the MMR, which is the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. In 1998, Wakefield published a case series of cherry-picked patients in which he strongly inferred that the MMR vaccine was associated with autism and “autistic enterocolitis.” Of […]

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

Antivaccinationists denying the cult of Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy

Two of the great “icons”—if you can call them “great” given that they’re icons but hardly “great”—of the antivaccine movement are Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. Over the last decade, they have arguably been the most influential people in the antivaccine movement. The reasons are simple. Let’s look at Jenny McCarthy first. In 2007, when […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

“Vaccine exceptionalism”: With friends like these, who needs enemies?

There’s an old saying that basically asks the question, “With friends like these, who needs enemies? or, as Voltaire (or Marshal Villars, depending on the account) said, “May God defend me from my friends: I can defend myself from my enemies.” The point, of course, is that friends or allies can sometimes be as infuriating […]