The Huffington Post‘s War on Medical Science: A Brief History
I realize that our fearless leader Steve Novella has already written about this topic twice. He has, as usual, done a bang-up job of describing how Arianna Huffington’s political news blog has become a haven for quackery, even going so far as to entitle his followup post The Huffington Post’s War on Science. And he’s absolutely right. The Huffington Post has waged...
Human subjects protections and research ethics: Where the rubber hits the road for science-based medicine
Although clinical trials are science, they often can't be controlled as well as experiments in most branches of science. The reason is that the experimental subjects are human, and ethics demands that risks and harms be minimized and benefits maximized.
J.B. Handley, Generation Rescue, and attacks on critics
I am writing this because a colleague of mine has been attacked, specifically, our fearless leader Steve Novella. J.B. Handley, Founder of “Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey’s Autism Organization – Generation Rescue” (whose usurpation by Jenny and Jim was apparently done in an opportunistic fashion but has had a consequence that must be galling to J.B., namely that some interviewers apparently think...
Mathematically modeling why quackery persists
It’s often puzzled me (and, I daresay, many other skeptics and boosters of science- and evidence-based medicine) why various forms of quackery and woo that have either about as close to zero prior probability as you can get and/or have failed to show evidence greater than placebo in clinical trials manage to retain so much traction among the public. Think homeopathy. Think...
Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends, part II: Generation Rescue, the anti-vaccine propaganda machine, and “Fourteen Studies”
I hadn’t planned on writing about the antivaccine movement again this week, so soon after having had to subject myself to yet another round of Jenny McCarthy on Larry King Live and a truly execrable Generation Rescue “study.” I really hadn’t. For one thing, there’s just so much nonsense laid down by antivaccinationists these days that it’s utterly impossible for one blogger...
This one’s for you, Dana
As you may have noticed, everybody’s “favorite” homeopath, Dana Ullman, has made a return visit to our humble little blog, where he is laying down his usual list of logical fallacies and irrelevencies (such as attacking Oliver Wendell Holmes) in defense of homeopathy. Consequently, now’s as good a time as any to unveil what is perhaps the best ready-for-a-poster criticism of homeopathy...
Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends: The Jenny and Jim antivaccine propaganda tour has begun
As hard as it is to believe, 2009 started out very promising from the perspective of actually countering the misinformation of the antivaccine movement. Antivaccine hero Andrew Wakefield, who with the help of the credulous and sensationalistic media started the entire MMR-autism scare in the U.K. a decade ago, was revealed as not just having been in the pocket of trial lawyers...
Sunday fun: On being “open minded”
One of the most common refrains from advocates of quackery and “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) is the charge of being “close-minded,” that they reject out of hand any idea that does not fit within their world view. Of course, this is a canard, given that science, including science-based medicine, thrives on the open and free exchange of ideas, and it is...
In Jenny McCarthy’s own words
Jenny McCarthy, regular readers of SBM know, has been a frequent target of criticism here. The reasons, of course, are very simple. She has become the most famous public face of the antivaccine movement, releasing a book every year or so since 2007 about how her son Evan has been “cured” of autism through the dubious biomedical treatments she’s given him and...
When “CAM” is mandatory: A science-based medical student’s dilemma
Early in the history of this blog, I wrote a rather long post expressing my dismay at the infiltration of unscientific “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine” (IM) modalities into American medical schools. In it, I listed the medical schools that had embraced pseudoscience through having started a CAM/IM program (a list desperately in need of an update). Moreover, we...