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Medicine of the past versus the present: Star Trek versus The Knick

Regular readers know that I’ve been a big Star Trek geek (more or less) ever since I first discovered reruns of the original Star Trek episodes in the 1970s, having been too young (but not by much!) to...

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Antivaccinationists versus Jonas Salk’s centennial

One thing that happened this week that I didn’t get around to writing about is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jonas Salk, which was October 28. In the annals of medicine, few people have had as...

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Science and the AAAS sell their souls to promote pseudoscience in medicine

NOTE: There is a follow up to this post. The holidays are over. Time to start dishing out fresh Insolence, Respectful and, as appropriate, not-so-Respectful for 2015. I do, however, feel obligated to...

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Nobody promotes antivaccine nonsense in my state…without receiving some...

Readers who’ve been following this blog a while would probably not be surprised to learn that one of my all time favorite movies is Ghostbusters. In fact, it’s hard to believe that the movie is now 30...

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Ancient cancer

As I sat on my couch last night, laptop sitting in front of me, I awaited the Ken Burns adaptation of Siddartha Mukherjee’s excellent book The Emperor of All Maladies into a three part television...

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The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 15: California SB 277, Robert F....

Later today, I’ll be on my way to New York City to take part in the Science-Based Medicine portion of NECSS. I’m very much looking forward to it, not the least because I haven’t been to New York in...

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Science. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it...

I’ve discussed on many occasions over the years how antivaccine activists really, really don’t want to be known as “antivaccine.” Indeed, when they are called “antivaccine” (usually quite correctly,...

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The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 18: Dr. Bob goes full Godwin over...

Antivaccinationists like Holocaust analogies. I’ve described this particularly loathsome phenomenon more times than I can remember, most recently when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. compared the...

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Just when I thought I had heard every bone-headed historical analogy by...

Ever since SB 277 became law, I didn’t think I’d be writing about it much anymore. Actually, I probably won’t be writing about it much any more, because it’s now a done deal. It’s the law of the land...

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The Woo Boat

File this one under the category: You can’t make stuff like this up. (At least, I can’t.) Let’s say you’re a die hard all-conspiracy conspiracy theorist and alternative medicine believer (a not...

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The autism “Holocaust”? Why antivaccine advocates are not autism advocates

A typical response to a charge of being antivaccine coming from someone whose rhetoric is definitely antivaccine is to clutch her pearls mightily and retort, “I’m not ‘anti-vaccine.’ I’m pro-vaccine...

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Vincent DeVita: We need more freedom to be mavericks. Orac: Not so much

One of my favorite television shows right now is The Knick, as I described before in a post about medical history. To give you an idea of how much I’m into The Knick, I’ll tell you that I signed up for...

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Makayla Sault’s mother: Racism, trust, and science-based medicine

One of the recurring topics I write about is, of course, cancer quackery. It goes right back to the very beginning of this blog, to my very earliest posts more than 11 years ago. Over the years I’ve...

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An antivaccine activist explains how she uses Facebook reporting algorithms...

I wish this post were an April Fools Day joke, but it is not. Three weeks ago, Skeptical Raptor and I wrote posts describing how a particularly vicious, nasty antivaccine troll named Heather Murray had...

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The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement, “I didn’t really mean it”...

It’s always nice when I learn that a target of my—shall we say?—Insolence takes note of what I’ve written. Well, maybe not always nice. Sometimes that notice takes the form of attacks, such as those by...

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The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 21: Oh, wait, maybe I am...

This is yet another in the continuing saga of “I’m not antivaccine,” a continuing series of posts demonstrating how the oh-so-loud and vigorous denials of antivaccine activists that they are...

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Antivaxers supported President-Elect Donald Trump. Now they want him to...

If you’re a skeptic dedicated to promoting science and reason, these are scary times. My country, the United States of America, just unexpectedly elected a racist, misogynistic, conspiracy-mongering,...

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In which I am compared to Donald Trump by a pro-quackademic medicine...

John Weeks has long been an activist for alternative medicine—excuse me, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, as it’s more commonly referred to these days, “integrative medicine.” Despite...

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The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 22: The Godwin of “We didn’t know”

This post is a bit later than usual, but there’s a good reason for it. Last night, I was in full food coma, having consumed the traditional Thanksgiving feast, along with a fair amount of wine....

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How cute. Naturopathic oncologists are pretending that theirs is a real...

Naturopathic oncologists think that they're real cancer doctors, to the point of even studying their specialty as though it were real. They couldn't be more wrong.

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2016: The year bullshit was weaponized

Conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, quackery, and belief in things that can be objectively demonstrated not to be true have always been with us. Unfortunately, 2016 was the year that this bullshit was...

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Holocaust denial from the White House on International Holocaust Remembrance Day

I always wondered how low Donald Trump could go. Now I know. Only I fear this is nowhere near the bottom.

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The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement: “Vaccine Holocaust” and...

Antivaxers are planning on publishing the personal information of employees of the Boston Herald because the paper published an editorial saying that promoting antivaccine misinformation among a...

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The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 25: We’re not antivaccine, we just...

Bloggers at the Age of Autism blog, like most antivaccine activists, vehemently deny that they are antivaccine, claiming instead that they are "vaccine safety" advocates. Their denials are belied by...

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Quackery so powerful that a famous physicist rolls over in his grave

Nikola Tesla was a physicist known to dabble in strange ideas, and that's probably why pseudoscientists have appropriated them to justify quackery and fringe ideas. However, I doubt even Tesla can be...

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