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Cancer Medicine

NBC News and false balance on whole body MRIs

A week ago, NBC News aired a story on whole body MRI scans. Although it did include the usual cautions about false positives and the harm they cause, the caution was diluted by the story’s focus a rare case of a woman who had a brain tumor detected. Overall, it was false balance that reminded me of vaccine/autism stories 20 years ago.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

An “un-American suppression” of antivaccine views or good reporting?

I’ve been writing a lot of posts on what I like to call the “antivaccine dogwhistle.” In politics, a “dog whistle” refers to rhetoric that sounds to the average person to be reasonable and even admirable but, like the way that a dog whistle can’t be heard by humans because the frequency of its tone […]