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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Open-minded to the point of brains falling out: Antivaccinationists appointed to federal autism panel

We’ve had one example this week of people with minds so open that their brains fell out at the Oxford Union, which invited Holocaust denier and British National Party leader Nick Griffin to “discuss free speech.” Now, sadly, I see another, this time it’s the United States government, which has invited die-hard antivaccinationists to be […]

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Autism

The Geiers try to patent chemical castration as an autism treatment

When it rains, it pours. Last week, we had the Shattuck paper; this week, I’m sucked right back into this topic, at least for today. A few weeks ago, I commented about a truly frightening direction that autism quackery was taking, with the father-son team of Mark and David Geier’s bizarre proposal that chemically castrating […]

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Autism

Kristjan Wager returns to discuss the Danish autism studies

Excellent. Having had to work on a talk last night, I didn’t have any time to write anything substantive. Horrified at the thought of this blog going silent on a weekday (going silent on the weekend doesn’t concern me much, given that my traffic almost always falls by around 50% regardless of whether I post […]

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Medicine Science

Is a medical Wikipedia a good idea?

I had wanted to proceed to part 5 of my Medicine and Evolution series, but, frankly, I wasn’t much in the mood for anything serious over the weekend, and, let’s face it, that case of the blog blahs continued even into yesterday. Otherwise I would have done my blog buds Abel Pharmboy and Bora more […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Still more evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism

The mercury militia and MMR scaremongers aren’t going to like this, not one bit. What should greet my in box upon my arrival at work after a long Fourth of July weekend, but an alert of a new study of a large population of children in Canada that utterly failed to find an epidemiological link […]