Category: Science and the Media

The curious case of Poul Thorsen, fraud and embezzlement, and the Danish vaccine-autism studies

If there’s one thing about the anti-vaccine movement, it’s all about the ad hominem attack. Failing to win on science, clinical trials, epidemiology, and other objective evidence, with few exceptions, anti-vaccine propagandists fall back on attacking the person instead of the evidence. For example, as I’ve noted numerous times, Paul Offit has been the subject of unrelenting attacks from Generation Rescue and...

/ April 25, 2011

Watch Steve Novella on The Dr. Oz Show on Tuesday!

UPDATE 4/27/2011: Here’s the online video of Dr. Novella’s appearance on The Dr. Oz Show: Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 1 Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 2 Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 3 I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I want you all to tune in to The Dr. Oz Show on Tuesday, April 26. Either that, or DVR it. Why...

/ April 22, 2011

CAM In Medical Schools

A recent US News and World Report article on the incorporation of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) into US medical schools credulously repeats the pro-CAM marketing hype. There is no evidence that the author, Meryl Davids Landau, spoke to a single critic of CAM, or is even aware that such criticism exists. The result looks more like marketing copy than serious journalism....

/ April 13, 2011

The World Has Moved On

I do a lot of driving as part of my job.  I am the sole Infectious Disease doctor at three hospitals and I can spend an hour or two a day in the car, depending on traffic.  What prevents me from going crazy sitting in traffic is listening to podcasts and audible books.    I especially like reading (and yes, audio books is...

/ April 8, 2011

Anti-vaccine propaganda from Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News

I’m not infrequently asked why the myth that vaccines cause autism and other anti-vaccine myths are so stubbornly resistant to the science that time and time again fails to support them. Certainly useful celebrity idiots like Jenny McCarthy are one reason. So, too, are anti-vaccine propaganda websites and blogs such as Age of Autism and anti-vaccine organizations like Generation Rescue, the National...

/ April 4, 2011

The Hazards of “CAM”-Pandering

Steven Salzberg, a friend of this blog and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, is on the editorial boards of three of the many journals published by BioMed Central (BMC), an important source of open-access, peer-reviewed biomedical reports. He is disturbed by the presence of two other journals under the BMC umbrella: Chinese Medicine...

/ April 1, 2011

Ann Coulter says: Radiation is good for you!

In her eagerness to convince everyone that radiation leakage from the Fukushima reactor damaged by the recent tsunami poses no threat, Ann Coulter turns the concept of hormesis on its head and tries to argue that a little extra ionizing radiation is good for you. Ann Coulter being Ann Coulter, she has no clue what she is talking about, but can spin...

/ March 21, 2011

Dr. Oz and John Edward: Just when I thought Dr. Oz couldn’t go any lower, he proves me wrong

We at SBM had thought Dr. Oz couldn't go any lower, but this week he proved us wrong. This Tuesday, Dr. Oz featured "psychic medium" scammer John Edward on his show and claimed that such psychic mediums can help people deal with their grief over the loss of a loved one.

/ March 17, 2011

Ethics in human experimentation in science-based medicine

Science-based medicine depends upon human experimentation. Scientists can do the most fantastic translational research in the world, starting with elegant hypotheses, tested through in vitro and biochemical experiments, after which they are tested in animals. They can understand disease mechanisms to the individual amino acid level in a protein or nucleotide in a DNA molecule. However, without human testing, they will never...

/ March 7, 2011

Skepticism versus nihilism about cancer and science-based medicine

Last Friday, Mark Crislip posted an excellent deconstruction of a very disappointing article that appeared in the most recent issue of Skeptical Inquirer, the flagship publication of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). I say “disappointing,” because I was disappointed to see SI (Skeptical Inquirer, not Sports Illustrated) publish such a biased, poorly thought out article, apparently for the sake of controversy....

/ February 28, 2011