Results for: jenny mccarthy
Bill Maher endorses cancer quackery
Over the last five years or so, I’ve often asked, “Is Bill Maher really that ignorant?” I’ve come to the conclusion that he is, and a couple of weeks ago laid out the evidence why right here on this very blog. (Lately Maher has been issuing Tweets that call people who get flu shots “idiots.”) Indeed, I even included in the post...
Is Francis Collins Bringing Sexy Back To Science?
I know. I was just as surprised as you are. Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project, author of The Language Of God, and new director of the National Institutes of Health performed live in front of a group of Washington locals at the Capitol building today. He actually jammed with Aerosmith’s Joe Perry in an “unplugged” performance of...
Crank “scientific” conferences: A parody of science-based medicine that can deceive even reputable scientists and institutions
Quacks crave respectability. To try to gain it, they often don the trappings of real medicine, such as holding medical conferences. To the uninitiated, such conferences can even look respectable. They aren't.
“Oh, come on, Superman!”: Bill Maher versus “Western medicine”
I realize that I’ve spent a fair amount of verbiage (to put it mildly) expressing my frustration with celebrities whose support for pseudoscience and even outright quackery endanger public health. The two most frequent targets of the wrath, sarcasm, frustration, and puzzlement of me and my partners in crime at SBM have been Jenny McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey for their...
Cashing In On Fear: The Danger of Dr. Sears
Dr. Sears is a popular pediatrician who has written a dangerous and deceptive book on vaccination.
Barriers To Adoption of Science-Based Medicine
I have a confession to make – it’s not easy keeping up with the other “Joneses” on this blog. My colleagues do a terrific job with thoroughly referenced analyses of key issues in medicine – and I sometimes struggle to think of topics that they haven’t already covered in more depth than I can. So today I asked my friends on Twitter...
Science under Siege
A new book, Science Under Siege: Defending Science, Exposing Pseudoscience addresses many of the issues near and dear to the hearts of SBM bloggers and readers. A compilation of some of the best writing from the last few years of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, it’s not only good reading but can serve as a useful reference. Skeptical Inquirer is the official magazine of...
How do scientists become cranks and doctors quacks?
What are the characteristics of physicians and scientists that lead them to go down the dark paths of quackery and pseudoscience?
Herd Immunity
Some infections can be eradicated from the face of the planet. Smallpox is the one example of disease eradication to date. Smallpox still exists in US and Russian labs, but there has been no wild cases since 1977. It is, like the Dorothy, history. Why were we able to eradicate smallpox? Three reasons: 1) There is only one form of smallpox. Unlike...
Science And The Game Of 20 Questions
An audience member at a recent NYC Skeptics meeting asked me how I handled conflict surrounding strongly held beliefs that are not supported by conclusive evidence. As a dentist, he argued, he often witnessed professionals touting procedure A over procedure B as the “best way” to do X, when in reality there are no controlled clinical trials comparing A and B. “How...