Category: Religion
Anti-vaxxers try to kill Florida bill ending childhood vaccination religious exemption
Anti-vaxxers and their misinformation campaign may have killed Senate Bill 64, repealing Florida's religious exemption to childhood immunizations, which is being abused by parents. Sen. Laura Book, the bill's sponsor, remains undeterred, citing the high risk of disease outbreaks in Florida.
Holotropic Breathwork
Holotropic breathwork is essentially voluntary hyperventilation, and old technique gaining in popularity as a way of generating "spiritual" experiences.
Bleaching away what ails you: The Genesis II Church is still selling Miracle Mineral Supplement as a cure-all
Miracle Mineral Supplement (MMS) has been sold by the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing as a cure-all to treat conditions and diseases as diverse as autism, cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and malaria. Indeed, it's touted as a cure for nearly all disease. It is, however, basically industrial bleach. As ridiculous and harmful as MMS is, it's a quackery that just...
“Detox”: Ritual purification masquerading as medicine and wellness
If the "central dogma" of alternative medicine is that wishing makes it so, one of the most important of the other organizing dogmas of alternative medicine is that "toxins," whether they come from inside or outside, are making us sick and that we can't be healthy until we "detoxify." This is far more a religious belief than a science-based one.
The claim that Gardasil causes premature ovarian failure: Ideology, not science
It’s amazing how, to antivaccine activists, it just so happens that a vaccine that targets a sexually transmitted virus must also destroy a girl’s ovaries. It must be a coincidence, right?
Antivaccinationists and the Nation of Islam protest in front of the CDC, but don’t you dare call them “antivaccine”
Cranks of a feather quack together. Antivaccinationists team up with the Nation of Islam to protest vaccines at the CDC.
“Aborted fetal tissue” and vaccines: Combining pseudoscience and religion to demonize vaccines
As hard as it is to believe after seven and a half years of existence and nearly 2,400 posts on SBM, every so often, something reminds me that we here at SBM haven’t discussed a topic that should be discussed. So it was a couple of weeks ago, when I saw a familiar name in a news story that wasn’t about vaccines....
The war in California over nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, part 2
California has passed SB 277 into law. Beginning in the 2016-2017 school year, SB 277 will eliminate personal belief exemptions to school vaccine requirements. This will benefit the health of California schoolchildren, but the law is not perfect and already antivaxers are looking for loopholes.
Answering Cancer Quackery: The Sophisticated Approach to True Believers
I got an e-mail with a link to a video featuring “Dr.” Leonard Coldwell, a naturopath who has been characterized on RationalWiki as a scammer and all-round mountebank. Here are just a few examples of his claims in that video: Every cancer can be cured in 2-16 weeks. The second you are alkaline, the cancer already stops. A pH of 7.36 is...