Category: Critical Thinking
Announcing a New Children’s Book that Promotes Critical Thinking
A new book teaches young children about critical thinking and evidence. It's not only educational but colorful and funny. Too many adults are like Henry, the little boy in the story who rejects clear evidence and persists in what he wants to believe.
Apples, Oranges, and How Not to Analyze a Vaccine RCT
The evidence is overwhelming that COVID vaccines keep people alive and out of the hospital. Only someone who starts with the conclusion that vaccines don't work and then works backwards to find the evidence could claim otherwise.
“Coronaphobia”: How antivaxxers and pandemic minimizers pathologize fear of disease
Over the weekend, Dr. Lucy McBride, a concierge medicine doctor who has become famous as a pandemic minimizer and one of the drivers of "Urgency of Normal", Tweeted an article that she had written over a year ago about "coronaphobia". Whether she understands it or not, this is a very old antivax trope: To pathologize fear of infectious disease as mental illness.
The return of the revenge of “COVID-19 mRNA vaccines permanently alter your DNA” and “lab leak”
Claims that COVID-19 vaccines "permanently alter your DNA" or that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab were resurrected last week based on two dubious studies. No matter how many times you think these myths have been debunked, they always come back for another installment of the same misinformation franchise.
“Debate me, bro!”: Debate challenges by science deniers in the age of COVID-19
Quacks, science deniers, and conspiracy theorists love to challenge doctors, scientists, and science communicators to "live public debates" over the science they deny. I just say no, and you should say no too if you are in a position to receive such a challenge.
The Misinformation Dilemma
Is there a workable solution to the social media dilemma?
Illness, Healing, and Other Terms That Can Be Confusing
Watch your language. Some terms that are frequently confused: pain vs. suffering, disease vs. illness, cure vs. healing. Science-based medicine focuses on diseases; alternative medicine focuses on illness: that explains a lot.
Yes, the FDA really HAS given full approval to the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine
After the FDA announcement a week ago that Comirnaty, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine developed by BioNTech and Pfizer, had been approved, it took less than a day for antivaxxers to spin a conspiracy theory claiming that the FDA hadn't really approved the Pfizer vaccine at all and that Comirnaty wasn't available, all to protect Pfizer from liability. It's a superficially plausible conspiracy...
The Science of Transgender Treatment
This is part I in what will be a short series of articles reviewing the science of transgender care and how it has been distorted by critics.
Sex and Racial Bias in Cardiac Care
Sex and racial biases in cardiac care partly reflect cognitive biases that can be corrected with education.