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Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Quoth an “integrative” functional medicine doc: “I’m not a quack, I’m an early adopter”

Integrative Medicine as the Trojan horse
The Trojan Horse (Rabbit) of quackademic medicine approaches the walls of medical academia. Unfortunately, all too often, the rabbit is often taken within the walls, allowing the woo to escape into the medical school and academic medical center. The result: Integrative medicine.

Functional medicine practitioner Dr. Melinda Ring thinks that she should be considered an “early adopter” instead of a quack. However, being an “early adopter” of quackery is not something to be admired.

Categories
Bad science Computers and social media Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine, take 5: But it won the Nobel Prize!

Ivermectin and fraud?

Ivermectin continues to be the new hydroxychloroquine, an unproven repurposed drug promoted to treat COVID-19. Now the advocates are pointing to the history of the drug’s developers being awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, as though that has anything to do with its effectiveness against COVID-19.

Categories
Bad science Medicine Popular culture

A bogus statistic about medical errors rears its ugly head in STAT

Medical errors
If you believe the conventional wisdom, medical errors are the number three cause of death in the US. Let's just say that Orac does not believe this study.

The claim that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US is one of those slasher statistics that just won’t die. This time around STAT News gave space to Michael Saks and Stephan Landsman to parrot that claim credulously in the service of selling their book.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Physicians who promote COVID-19 and antivaccine misinformation should lose their medical license

Medical license

The Federation of State Medical Boards warned physicians that spreading COVID-19 misinformation might jeopardize their license to practice. It’s about time the FSMB said that, but I have serious doubts that anything will happen.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Politics

Antivaxxers invoke segregation and Jim Crow to attack COVID-19 vaccination requirements

Vaccine passports are not segregation like this
Contrary to what antivaxxers claim, COVID-19 vaccine requirements are not the equivalent of this.

Before the pandemic, antivaxxers tried to don the mantle of the “new civil rights movement.” Now they’re invoking segregation and Jim Crow over COVID-19 vaccination requirements.