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Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The Enemies of Reason, part 2: The Irrational Health Service (with a review)

Thanks to Blake, I now have The Enemies of Reason, Part 2: My review of this episode is below the fold. I managed to BitTorrent the episode and watch it on my laptop on my flight back from Chicago last night. If you don’t want to be influenced by my opinion before watching, watch the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Dan Olmsted joins Mike Adams in abusing Breast Cancer Awareness month for his own purposes

Having gotten into the whole idea of blogging about peer-reviewed research yesterday and even using a spiffy new icon to denote that that’s what I’m doing, originally I had planned on looking up another interesting article or pulling one from my recent reading list and blogging about it. Then, realizing that Breast Cancer Awareness Month […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery

Representative Dan Burton: Abusing his power to influence the outcome of the Autism Omnibus hearings?

It’s been a while since I mentioned the Autism Omnibus hearings. The Omnibus proceeding is the culmination of all the legal cases brought to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program by nearly 5,000 families who “feel” that their children’s autism was caused by vaccines. Many, but not all, of the plaintiffs blame the mercury in the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Closing the year on a great note: The mercury militia’s “experts” slapped down

What better way to finish off 2007 than to look at a most amusing judicial ruling on the admissibility of some of the favorite “expert” witnesses trotted out to try to demonstrate a link between mercury in vaccines and autism. It was issued on December 21 in the case of Blackwell v. Sigma Aldrich, Inc. […]

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

When antivaccination pseudoscience turns threatening…

While I’m back on the topic of vaccines again (and that topic seems to me less and less rancorous these days, not because antivaccination “activists” have gotten any less loony but because the smoking cranks, at least the ones showing up on my blog these days, threaten to make antivaccinationists seem low key by comparison), […]