Results for: autism
A Defense of Childhood Influenza Vaccination and Squalene-Containing Adjuvants; Joseph Mercola’s “Dirty Little Secret”
Fall is around the corner, and with it comes the influenza season. Each year an average of 200,000 people in the US are hospitalized with influenza, and 36,000 die.1,2 With the addition of the novel H1N1 strain (swine flu), this season promises to be more interesting, and even less predictable, than most. There can be no doubt, however, that this one set of...
New SBM Resource – and a Word on Vaccines
We frequently receive requests from readers, our colleagues in medicine or fellow science bloggers for the best reference site that has all the information they need on a specific topic. There are many excellent resources on the net, but nothing I know of that quite puts it all together in that way – one-stop shopping for up-to-date information on the topics we...
SBM Topic-Based Reference
This section of Science-Based Medicine is dedicated to reference resources for major topics and issues relevant to science and medicine. For each topic we will give a concise overview followed by an index of SBM posts on the topic, and key outside resources. We will also list important peer-reviewed research relating to the topic with a brief description of the findings. This...
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.
Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Darrell Issa declare war on science-based medicine
In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall likes to call “tooth fairy science,” where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I’ve often taken Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) to task,...
Magic diet? Not so much
Alternative medicine practitioners love to coin magic words, but really, how can you blame them? Real medicine has a Clarkeian quality to it*; it’s so successful, it seems like magic. But real doctors know that there is nothing magic about it. The “magic” is based on hard work, sound scientific principles, and years of study. Magic words are great. Terms like mindfulness,...
Report from the SBM Conference
On July 9th we held our first Science Based Medicine conference in Las Vegas. The event was definitely a success – we filled our room to capacity (150 attendees) and almost everyone stayed until the end. It also appeared that most attendees were actually awake, a rarity for a full-day medical conference. The Q&A session at the end was lively and interesting....
Cranks, quacks, and peer review
Last week, I wrote one of my characteristically logorrheic meandering posts about what turns a scientist into a crank or a doctor into a quack. In a sort of continuation of this line of thinking, this week I’ll turn my attention to one of the other most common characteristics of a crank, be he scientific crank (i.e., a creationist), a quack, or...
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?