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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery

Calling out false “balance” on vaccines and autism

Manufactroversy. It’s wonderful, made-up word that describes a phenomenon so aptly, so brilliantly, that I like to use it all the time. Basically the word describes a manufactured controversy that is motivated by either extreme ideology (virtually always crank ideology) and/or profit that is intentionally stoked to create public confusion about a scientific issue that […]

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Clinical trials Medicine

Neonatal death rates after home births and a strange skeptic kerfuffle

If there’s a topic that I don’t write about much, it’s obstetrics. The reason is that it’s not a major area of my interest, and it’s not an area where I have as much expertise as I do in, say, cancer or even vaccines. My expertise in cancer comes from my career, of course, and […]

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Cancer Medicine Politics Popular culture Surgery

No, redefining cancer doesn’t mean death panels

Blogging is a rather immediate endeavor. Over the last nine years (nearly), I’ve lost track of how many times I saw something that I wanted to blog about but but by the time I got around to it was no longer topical. Usually what happens is that my Dug the Dog tendencies take over, as […]

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Medicine

Uncertainty versus certainty in the mammography wars

As I write this, I am winging my way home from the 2014 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR, Twitter hashtag #AACR14) in San Diego. (OK, I’m revising this to fit the format and, of course, the Insolence of this particular blog. Shockingly, I didn’t have as much time to blog in […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

Why won’t you call me, RFK, Jr.? Let’s talk about vaccines!

What’s Keith Kloor got that I haven’t got? What’s Laura Helmuth got that I haven’t got? Why won’t Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. call me to complain about all the not-so-Respectful Insolence I’ve directed his way over the years. I mean, seriously. I spend nearly eight years criticizing his antivaccine crank views, and these two get […]