Respectful Insolence Latest Blog Posts

Alright, I'm officially tired of the latest Age of Autism outrage. So, while I wait for J.B. Handley to strike back (or not), let's move on to lighter subjects for a moment. And what better to cleanse the palate of the vision of cannibals eating babies as a metaphor for those who standup for ...

He's baaaack. Deepak Chopra. Remember him? It's been a while since I've said much about him and him alone. True, I've gone after him this year when he joined up with three other major league woo-meisters Dean Ornish, Rustum Roy, and Andrew Weil to try to try to help Senator Tom Harkin hijack ...

I debated whether or not to blog about this. The reason is that I suspect that gathering a lot of attention and controversy is exactly what Generation Rescue wanted when it posted what I'm about to blog about. On the other hand, no matter how low my opinion is of the principals who run ...

Well, now. With the long four day weekend that many of us here in the U.S. have enjoyed finally over, it's time to get back to serious business. Serious, but fun. I'm referring to the upcoming 125th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle , which will be held at Effort Sisyphus on Thursday, December 3. ...

I've been writing about the attempts of proponents of various pseudoscience, quackery, and faith-based religious "healing" modalities to slip provisions friendly to their interests into the health care reform bill that will be debated in the Senate beginning today. If you want to know what's at ...

A couple of years ago, fellow ScienceBlogger Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism Blog coined a most excellent term to describe all manners of pseuodscience, quackery, and crankery. The term, " crank magnetism ," describes the tendency of cranks not to mind it when they see crankery in others. More ...

The day before the Thanksgiving holiday, I wrote about a serious contender for the worst medical reporting of the year, if not the decade, specifically how credulous reporters had swarmed all over the case of a Belgian man named Rom Houben. If you don't remember or haven't heard about the ...

I happen to be fortunate enough this year to have taken the Friday after Thanksgiving off, and it is a very good thing indeed. However, this morning, having indulged in the American tradition of stuffing myself full of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and various other most excellent and ...

It's Thanksgiving here in the States; so I plan on taking the day off from blogging that I might partake of the American custom of stuffing myself to the point of unconsciousness with family. In the meantime, bow before the genius of the Muppets, as they perform one of my favorite songs of ...

You know, I have three manuscripts in the hopper with two of them having recently been returned to me with reviewers' comments. Frustratingly, one of these is a manuscript that I've been trying to get published for nearly a year now. Given that I appear to have some work to do over the long ...

Remember how I nominated a truly execrable local news report about Desiree Jennings as a serious contender for the worst reporting of the year, perhaps even of the decade? It had everything, and I seriously doubted that anything would challenge it for credulous supremacy any time soon. How ...

As hard as I find it to believe, the fifth anniversary of this blog is fast approaching. When I started this whole endeavor, it was more or less on a whim that struck me on a cold, dreary, gray Saturday in December, and I had no idea that five years later I'd still be at it, much less that I'd ...

I hate to revisit this case again. However, some of my readers have sent me links to something that compels me to dig up the rotting corpse of Generation Rescue's despicable attempt to use the suffering of a troubled young woman to push the idea that vaccines are harmful. I'm referring, of ...

There are times when I look back, and I can't believe I've been at it this long. It's not just the blogging, the fifth anniversary of which is rapidly approaching for me. Hard as it is to believe, not only have I become a "venerable" medical and skeptical blogger, but there are actually a lot ...

Before I try to leave this topic for a while (which, like so may topics in the past, has temporarily taken over the blog for the last few days), one of the comments I've kept hearing since I started blogging about the new USPSTF mammography guidelines is something along the lines of, "Well, if ...

It's time for another installment of that venerable (gasp!) blog carnival of skepticism, science, and critical thinking, The Skeptics' Circle . This time, it's the 124th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle , and it's finally landed, late but still brimming with skeptical goodness at Beyond the ...

As I discussed in detail when I analyzed them , the new USPSTF recommendations for screening mammography for breast cancer have sparked a debate that has degenerated from a scientific and public policy debate into pure emotional rhetoric. When last I visited this topic, yesterday, I had ...

I knew when I first heard about them that the new United States Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations on breast cancer screening would be controversial. I tried to discuss these guidelines and the issues involved in a calm and rational way, relatively devoid of Insolence, ...

"Early detection saves lives." Remember how I started a post a year and a half ago saying just this? I did it because that is the default assumption and has been so for quite a while. It's an eminently reasonable-sounding concept that just makes sense. As I pointed out a year and a half ago, ...