Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

As Andrew Wakefield’s defenders circle the wagons

If my post today is a bit shorter on the usual Respectfully and not-so-Respectfully Insolent verbiage that you’ve come to know and love (or hate), I hope you’ll forgive me. It’s hard not to sit back, rest a bit, and enjoy the spectacle of Andrew Wakefield being pilloried in the press in the wake of […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery Television

Dr. Oz defiantly embraces The Dark Side

Stick a fork in Dr. Oz. He’s done. I know I’ve been highly critical of Dr. Mehmet Oz, Vice Chair of the Department of Surgery at Columbia University and medical director of the Integrative Medicine Program (i.e., Columbia’s quackademic medicine) program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Those are his academic titles. More important, in terms of […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Mothering: A bastion of woo targeted at young mothers

Over the last three weeks, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been publishing a multipart expose by investigative journalist Brian Deer that enumerated in detail the specifics of how a British gastroenterologist turned hero of the anti-vaccine movement had committed scientific fraud by falsifying key aspects of case reports that he used as the basis […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

For the anti-vaccinationists out there: The results of a real “vaxed versus unvaxed” study

In many ways, the anti-vaccine movement is highly mutable. However, this mutability is firmly based around keeping one thing utterly constant, and that one thing is vaccines. No matter what the evidence, no matter what the science, no matter how much observational, scientific, and epidemiological evidence is arrayed against them, to the relentlessly self-confident members […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Building bridges” to the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement?

Thanks to Andrew Wakefield, it’s been pretty much vaccine week for me. Well, mostly anyway, I did manage to have some fun with Mike Adams and the immune system, but otherwise it’s been all vaccines all the time this week. As I mentioned yesterday, at the risk of dwelling on one topic so long that […]