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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Andrew Wakefield: Destined for even more disrepute

I must admit that I never saw it coming. At least, I never saw it coming this fast and this dramatically. After all, this is a saga that has been going on for twelve solid years now, and it’s an investigation that has been going on at least since 2004. I’m referring, of course, to […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Homeopathy gets needled

I realize that there are two huge target-rich articles out there that my readers have been clamoring for me to comment on. First, there’s a particularly silly and simplistic article by Nicholas Kristof about how it’s supposedly the “toxins” causing autism (an article in which he apparently doesn’t realize that Current Opinions in Pediatrics is […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Quoth Mark “not a doctor, not a scientist” Blaxill: “Help, help, Andy Wakefield’s being repressed!”

Help! Help! I’m being repressed. Somehow, that is the image I have gotten in the three weeks since the very last shred of Andrew Wakefield’s facade of scientific respectability tumbled. As you may recall, at the end of January, the British General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield, the man whose trial lawyer-funded, breathtakingly incompetent, and […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Fear the omniscience of Orac, evildoers!

Orac knows all. Orac sees all. Orac discovers all. Anti-vaccine loons, know this and tremble, as Teresa Conrick over at J.B. Handley’s–excuse me, Jenny McCarthy’s–home for happy anti-vaccine propagandists has: While googling to find the Tribune article, I instead found Orac’s site. Who is Orac? Well, suffice to say that he has some mysterious desire […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Poul Thorsen: The fine art of distraction from inconvenient facts

My first big splash in the blogosphere will have occurred five years ago in June, when I first discovered the utter wingnuttery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It was then that I wrote a little bit of that not-so-Respectful Insolence that you’ve come to know and love entitled Salon.com flushes its credibility down the […]