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Cancer Medicine Popular culture

A tourist finds breast cancer after a thermal scan at Camera Obscura. That doesn’t mean thermography works.

Bal Gill saw a hot spot on her breast on a thermal image she had taken at Camera Obscura in Edinburgh. This led her to see her doctor, who diagnosed breast cancer. Although a happy coincidence, this incident does not mean that thermography is an effective modality to detect occult breast cancer.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine

Bell’s palsy, syncope, and death: The impending antivax tsunami of fake COVID-19 vaccine “adverse reactions”

Reports of Bell’s palsy and syncopy after vaccination with RNA-based COVID-19 vaccines remind us how antivaxxers will weaponize anything bad happening after vaccination. Sadly, I predict an impending tsunami of confusing correlation with causation.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Quackery

Barbara Loe Fisher cries “McCarthyism!” over vaccines

Barbara Loe Fisher is back. This time, instead of Nazis and the Holocaust, she’s comparing vaccine mandates and bad press about antivaxers to McCarthyism and their “persecution” to that faced by anyone suspected of Communism in the early 1950s.

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Cancer Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

The “Cancer Truther” movement

Denial of the benefits of chemotherapy is very prevalent in “natural health” movements. This denial is based on fear mongering, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories and thus shares many similarities with the antivaccine movement. How can the “chemo truth” spread by “cancer truthers”?

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Antivaccine nonsense Computers and social media Medicine Pseudoscience

Larry Cook’s “Stop Mandatory Vaccination” page is about to be removed by Facebook

Stop Mandatory Vaccination is one of the largest antivaccine groups on Facebook. This week its creator and administrator Larry Cook announced that Facebook is on the verge of deleting it. Is Facebook finally getting serious about anti vaccine misinformation on its platform?