Beth Landau-Halpern
oracknows | August 4, 2015About a month ago, a number of news stories were published reporting that the University of Toronto had offered a course in alternative medicine taught by a homeopath named Beth Laundau-Halpern that presented a segment that was clearly highly biased towards antivaccine pseudoscience. It was worse than that, though, because this homeopathy just happened to be married to a dean at the university named Rick Halpern. The whole thing blew up into an embarrassing fiasco that demanded a response from the University. Unfortunately, this came in the form of a weaselly report, in which Vivek Goel,…
oracknows | July 6, 2015Aside from deconstructing the misinformation and pseudoscience of the antivaccine movement, another of the top three or so topics I routinely discuss here is the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine. In particular, I've found and discussed more examples than I can possibly remember of what I like to call quackademic medicine, defined as the infiltration of quackery into academic medicine. This quackery mainly insinuates its way into medical schools and academic medical centers through the emerging specialty known as "integrative medicine," which used to be called "complementary and…