Categories
Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

You haven’t walked in my shoes!

At the risk of muscling in on Bronze Dog‘s territory, I’ve encountered a phenomenon that ought to be in his list of doggerel but doesn’t appear to be. It appeared in the comments of my post about the Arthur Allen-David Kirby debate and my discussion of how the human tendency to see patterns where none […]

Categories
Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery

An uninformative “experiment” on dichloroacetate (DCA) and cancer

I hadn’t planned on writing about dichloroacetate, the inexpensive compound whose success in treating experimental cancer in rats that provoked a blogopheric storm about a “cancer cure” that would supposedly never see the light of day because it’s not patentable. After all, I’ve done about seven posts on the topic, give or take a couple, […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Ben Goldacre takes on Mark and David Geier

Somehow, in all the blogging about dichloroacetate earlier this week, I somehow missed a mention of a truly annoying thing that the editors of Lancet Neurology did. In essence, they allowed ethically challenged mercury warrior Mark Geier a forum to review Richard Lathe’s book Autism, Brain, and Environment. Egads! How desperate wer the editors of […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The depths of antivaccination lunacy

I’ve posted many times about the pseudoscience of the mercury militia, that group of parents, bolstered by those Don Quixotes tilting at the mercury windmills in the cause of extracting more money from the government to compensate “vaccine-injured” children with autism, Mark and David Geier. These and other luminaries of the mecury militia blame vaccines […]

Categories
Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Studying homeopathy in Third World countries

I’m on the record multiple times as saying that I reject the entire concept and nomenclature of “alternative medicine” as being distinct from “conventional” medicine as a false dichotomy, when in reality there should be just “medicine.” Moreover, this “medicine” remaining should, whenever possible, be based on sound scientific and clinical trial evidence. In essence, […]