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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Is evidence-based medicine “sufficient” for alternative medicine research?

One of the consistent themes of this blog since the very beginning has been that alternative medicine treatments, before being accepted, should be subject to the same standards of evidence as “conventional” medical therapies. When advocates of evidence-based medicine (EBM) like myself say this, we are frequently treated with excuses from advocates of alternative medicine […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science

The sociology of the antivaccination movement

Drat! Real life has once again interfered with my blogging. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of what I consider to be good stuff in the archives of the old blog that has yet to be transferred to the new blog. Today looks like a perfect time to transfer at least a couple more articles from […]

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Medicine News of the Weird

A truly pointless way to die, part 2

The other day, I commented on the very sad death of a young woman named Jennifer Strange. In essence, Ms. Strange died after a radio contest to see who could drink the most water without urinating. The prize? A Wii. This was pretty clearly a case of water intoxication leading to hyponatremia, an impression that […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics

In which my words will be misinterpreted as “proof” that I am a “pharma shill”

I would have written about this one on Friday, except that Your Friday Dose of Woo had to be served up. (You did read last week’s YFDoW, didn’t you? It was a particularly loopy bit of woo, with a bad computer interface grafted on to it, to boot!) The reason I wanted to write about […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Arthur Allen-David Kirby Debate: All about a story with “legs”

Well, it’s finally been posted, video of the debate between Arthur Allen, author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver (a book that I am about 2/3 of the way through and plan on reviewing before the end of the month if possible) and mercury militia vaccine fearmonger David Kirby, author of Evidence […]