Day: March 29, 2010

“Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked

If there’s one thing about the anti-vaccine movement I’ve learned over the last several years, it’s that it’s almost completely immune to evidence, science, and reason. No matter how much evidence is arrayed against it, its spokespeople always finds a way to spin, distort, or misrepresent the evidence to combat it and not have to give up the concept that vaccines cause...

/ March 29, 2010

The case of John Lykoudis and peptic ulcer disease revisited: Crank or visionary?

One of the themes of SBM has been, since the very beginning, how the paradigm of evidence-based medicine discounts plausibility (or, perhaps more appropriately, implausibility) when evaluating whether or not a given therapy works. One of our favorite examples is homeopathy, a therapy that is so implausible on a strictly scientific basis that, for it to work, huge swaths of well-established science...

/ March 29, 2010