Results for: vaccines
The $150,000 Vaccine Challenge
A man named Jock Doubleday has offered $150,000 to any physician who gives vaccines to drink the chemicals in a vaccine. It's a profoundly dishonest challenge, so full of conditions that it's clear it was meant never to be honored, much less paid.
The fallacy of “balance” and “fairness” about unscientific health claims in the media: A case study
For those of us who have dedicated ourselves to promoting science-based medicine, one of the most frustrating impediments to our message is the media. Time and time again, I’ve complained about how the media takes unscientific health claims, particularly when it comes to vaccines, and gives a credulous hearing to them. Sometimes, it’s a filmmaker with a distinct ideological axe to grind...
Egnorance is Bliss
A few years ago, at a skeptics conference in Los Angeles, Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch had just finished giving a talk and was fielding questions from the audience. Someone asked, “why don’t you ever talk about how dangerous regular medicine is?” Dr. Barrett, with a look of bewilderment in his face and a tone of exasperation in his voice, replied: “This is what I...
Influenza Deaths
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”- Donald Rumsfeld How do we know what we know? It is said by some anti-vaccine proponents that vaccines...
“I Reject Your Reality” – Germ Theory Denial and Other Curiosities
Note: This article was originally published in Skeptic magazine. Space limitations resulted in omitting some of what I wanted to say. I’m taking advantage of having a blog to publish the entire article as originally submitted. —————— On an episode of Mythbusters, Adam Savage was shown a video clip that contradicted his memory of something he had said. He responded, “I reject...
Google Trends and the Interest in Alternative Medicine
USA Today has come out with a new survey – apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population. –David Letterman How popular is alternative medicine? One way is to survey people and ask them. Like all surveys, the nature of the question determines the answer. The first, and probably most referenced, and misquoted, article on ‘alternative’ medicine...
Dr. Jay Gordon – “Anti-Vaccination”
Dr. Jay Gordon is a pediatrician and one of the stars of the anti-vaccinationist movement. (Dr. Gorski wrote an exellent criticism of many of his claims recently on SBM.) He is, in fact, the pediatrician to Jenny McCarthy’s son, Evan (who she claims was injured by vaccines). Several months ago he published an “open letter on vaccinations” which is now making the...
Gulf War Illness
One-fourth of the veterans of the 1990-91 Gulf War complain of persistent memory and concentration problems, chronic headaches, widespread pain, gastrointestinal problems, and other chronic abnormalities not explained by well-established diagnoses. Treatments are ineffective and symptoms do not improve over time. Gulf War Syndrome or Gulf War Illness is a controversial diagnosis, and some have questioned whether it really exists. Now a...
The (Not-So-)Beautiful (Un)Truth about the Gerson protocol and cancer quackery
Note added by editor: The complete movie is now available on YouTube: Although this blog is about medicine, specifically the scientific basis of medicine and threats to the scientific basis of medicine regardless of the source, several of us also have an interest in other forms of pseudoscience and threats to other branches of science. One branch of science that is, not...
The Infection Schedule versus the Vaccination Schedule
Antivaccination activists have claimed that when it comes to there are "too many, too soon". They apparently do not grasp the number of bacteria and viruses (and fungi and parasites) that we are exposed to every day for our entire life.