American Academy of Family Physicians
oracknows | July 9, 2017I have to start this post with a mea culpa, perhaps even a mea maxima culpa. I've been going on and on, in essence gloating about how the antivaccine movement was once again betrayed by Donald Trump. After the betrayal that was the appointment of the ultimate pro-vaccine pharma shill as FDA Commissioner, the second betrayal was the appointment of Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald as the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And, yes, on the surface, Dr. Fitzgerald doesn't appear to be that bad a pick for CDC director. She has a history of being very pro-vaccine during her…
oracknows | August 15, 2016In the early days of 2016, my attention was drawn to a local antivaccine doctor of whom I’d heard before but never really paid much attention to. What caught my eye was a blog exchange between this “holistic” family practitioner and former Scienceblogs blogger, friend, and local internist Peter Lipson over this physician’s blog posts attacking a local Jewish summer camp for children for its new requirement that campers must be up to date on their vaccinations as a requirement for attending. Not surprisingly, Dr. Lipson took the side of science and refuted the antivaccine nonsense that had…
oracknows | October 14, 2012In a week and a half, Harriet Hall, Kimball Atwood, and I will be joining Eugenie C. Scott at CSICon to do a session entitled Teaching Pseudoscience in Medical (and Other) Schools. As you might imagine, we will be discussing the infiltration of pseudoscience into medical academia and medical training, a phenomenon I frequently refer to as "quackademic medicine." It's a topic that has been much discussed on this blog; so I am quite confident that we are the people to tell our audience just how bad it is, why it's happening, and why you should be concerned about it. Also, from my perpective,…
oracknows | August 7, 2012One of the consistent themes I've maintained on this blog over the years is to combat in my own small way in my own small corner of the Internet, the influx into medical academia of medicine based not on science, but on prescientific notions of disease, vitalism, and magic, such as homeopathy (which is sympathetic magic), reiki (which is faith healing), and the like. In general, we expect professional societies to maintain and support the scientific basis of medicine. Unfortunately, increasingly, medical societies have been failing us.
Here's just a short reminder of yet another example. This…