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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Religion Science

Cranks of a feather: The Nation of Islam and the Church of Scientology team with antivaccine activists to oppose SB 277

The saga of SB 277 just keeps getting stranger and stranger as its end game comes into view. SB 277 is, of course, a big deal. If it’s passed by the California Assembly and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown, it would eliminate nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, making the largest state in […]

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Medicine

The Genesis II Church holds a secret MMS quackery conference in England

Regular readers might have wondered why there was no post yesterday. The answer’s simple: A combination of work and having to fly out to Buffalo for the CFI Reason for Change conference, where I’ll be on a panel on (of course!) alternative medicine later today. That same combination means that this post will be uncharacteristically […]

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

In which pro-vaccine advocates are inappropriately portrayed as frenzied, self-righteous “zealots”

One of the odd things about having been a blogger as long as I have been is that, occasionally, posts that I wrote years ago rise up to bite me long after I’ve forgotten that I even wrote them. Actually, that’s usually not the right way to put it. Blogging is a very short term […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A victory in the long war against autism quackery

As depressing as the litany of quackery and patient harm that I follow nearly every day can become, occasionally I am heartened to learn of a victory for science-based medicine and, more importantly, for the patients being victimized by pseudoscientific treatments. One of the most simultaneously ridiculous and vile of these treatments is a solution […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking Uncategorized

A Dunning-Kruger manifesto about vaccines and autism

I’ve frequently written about the “arrogance of ignorance,” a phenomenon that anyone who’s paid attention to what quacks, cranks, or antivaccine activists (but I repeat myself) write and say beyond a certain period of time will have encountered. Basically, it’s the belief found in such people—and amplified in groups—that somehow they can master a subject […]