March 18, 2010
Category: Alternative medicine • Medicine • Pseudoscience • Quackery • Science • Skepticism/critical thinking
It's been a while since I wrote about this topic, but I fear for the future of medicine.
Regular readers know what I'm talking about. The infiltration of various unscientific, pseudoscientific, and even anti-scientific "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) modalities into academic medicine seems increasingly to be endangering science-based medicine. Worse, this infiltration of quackery seems at least as bad, if not worse, in academic medicine, so much so that Dr. R.W. coined a most exquisite term for the increasing prevalence of pseudoscience in medical academia: Quackademic medicine. Whether it is the American Medical Student Association promoting quackery, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) funding studies of homeopathy, medical schools adopting pseudoscience wholesale in their medical curriculum, or hospitals using it to attract woo-friendly paying patients, there is ample reason to fear for the scientific basis of medicine. It's not just the U.S., either. All you have to do is to peruse David Colquhoun's DC's Improbable Science to know that this is a phenomenon that transcends national boundaries and has made its way into virtually every industrialized nation, particularly in the U.K. and Europe.
The result, it would appear, is a generation of medical students with far too many students like Jonny Martell. Jonny Martell is a third year medical student at Kings College London, and he has apparently found sufficient time away from his studies to write paeans to woo like The magic of alternative medicine. Sadly, he doesn't see the irony of his chosen title. Alternative medicine is magic, all right. For what is homeopathy, if not magic? What is the idea that a healer can manipulate some sort of "life force" that is undetectable by modern scientific instruments in order to heal people but magic? What are psychics but people who either lie about being able to do magic or have deluded themselves into thinking they can do it? Yet, Mr. Martell feels inadquate around psychics:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 70 Comments
Category: Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
Given the resurgence of the mercury militia over the last week or so in response to the Poul Thorsen case, I was amused to have found what looks to me to be the cure for autism.
The cure?
Well, if you're a member of the mercury militia and believe that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism, isn't the cure obvious? Come on! Think! You must know. Here's a hint: Similia similibus curentur.
That's right. We're talking a 30C dilution of homeopathic thimerosal, baby! Why didn't anyone think of it before?
Hey, given the vast amount of data refuting the idea that thimerosal in vaccines causes autism, the idea that homeopathic thimerosal should cure autism is about as plausible, right?
Posted by Orac at 12:00 AM • 24 Comments
March 17, 2010
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Politics
Kent Heckenlively shows us why AoA is "not anti-vaccine":
Bruesewitz v. Wyeth has the potential to move all that in a new direction. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act simply states, "No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable . . . if the injury or death resulted from side-effect that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings."
What does that mean in plain English? The example I've always heard used in reference to such a standard is dynamite. Now we all know what dynamite does. It blows up. So, if you light a stick of dynamite, wait over it, and it blows up, you're out of luck. By its very nature dynamite is an inherently unsafe product.
But if you have a six-foot fuse, light it, and as you try to run away the fuse burns so quickly that you can't escape, well, you're entitled to recovery. Or, if they use substandard chemicals and the dynamite simply blows up while sitting in a box, then you're entitled to recovery.
You can still sell dynamite. As the manufacturer you just need to sell the safest dynamite you can produce.
To Kent Heckenlively, vaccines are like dynamite; their purpose is to explode and thereby destroy. I find it quite telling that Heckenlively couldn't think of another example to illustrate his point. I'm surprised he restrained himself not to use another similar example, such as firearms. In any case, note how he chose the example of a product designed to destroy in the context of crowing over a Supreme Court case that, in the unlikely event the plaintiffs prevail, could severely limit the power and scope of the Vaccine Court.
Posted by Orac at 3:00 PM • 28 Comments
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Evolution • Intelligent design/creationism • Medicine • Pseudoscience • Quackery • Science • Skepticism/critical thinking
It's rare that I encounter a bit of nonsense that allows me to deploy two of my favorite rhetorical devices. First, it lets me pull out one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies, in which the immortal line, "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" was first uttered. Second, it lets me repeat once again yet another variation of Inigo Montoya's immortal words. It's a two-fer! Not surprisingly, it's courtesy of the anti-vaccine crank blog we've all come to know and love (well, I love it because it has provided me such a target-rich environment for taking on quackery and woo, although I hate it because, well, it promotes anti-vaccine quackery and woo). Yes, we're talkin' Age of Autism, and this time it's Katie Wright crying repression and censorship in a little screed she called Sebelius Asks Media to Censor Autism Debate.
"Censor." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I'll show you why. First, let's look at what provoked Wright's little bit of willful misinterpretation:
There are groups out there that insist that vaccines are responsible for a variety of problems, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. We (the office of Secretary of Health and Human Services) have reached out to media outlets to try to get them not to give the views of these people equal weight in their reporting.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 236 Comments
Category: Entertainment/culture • Humor • Medicine • Music
Apparently someone at a British hospital thought that this was a good idea.
I beg to differ. Words fail me. It's rare, I know, but occasionally it does happen.
Posted by Orac at 12:00 AM • 20 Comments
March 16, 2010
Category: Alternative medicine • Friday Woo • Medicine • Pseudoscience • Skepticism/critical thinking
I realize that I've said many times before that there is no such thing as "alternative" medicine. There is medicine that has been shown to work through science, medicine that has not yet been shown to work, and medicine that has been shown not to work. "Alternative" medicine that is shown to work through science ceases to be "alternative" and becomes simply medicine.
There are times when I think I might need to change that opinion.
Well, not exactly. However, promoters of various forms of alternative medicine, stymied when they try to show that their woo works through science, seem to think that they can just make up alternative science in order to "explain" their favored quackery. Some of the people who do this have rather--shall we say?--colorful imaginations, too. Remember, for example, Lionel Milgrom and his torturing of quantum physics to justify homeopathy? Or his imagining the "healer"-patient relationship as a "quantized gyroscope"? Or Milgrom's representation of homeopathy as the "semiotic notion that the homeopathic remedy is a 'sign' working simultaneously in and for two different but connected meaningful contexts"? Sadly, Milgrom is not alone in just making shit up. Dr. Charlene Werner, for instance, is not nearly as imaginative or talented at making woo up as Milgrom, as her widely mocked video about homeopathy and "energy" shows. The same is true of John Benneth and his even sillier attribution of clathrate hydrates as the One True Mechanism by which homeopathy works. When science doesn't support woo-meisters, apparently they feel free to make science say whatever they need it to say to "explain" their quackery.
And I've found another doozy, this time from William A. Tiller. We've met William Tiller before. At the time, he actually had the audacity to propose a "higher-dimensional-level substance, labeled deltrons, falling outside the constraints of relativity theory and able to move at velocities" faster than the speed of light and that acts as "a coupling agent between the electric monopole types of substances and the magnetic monopole types of substances to produce both electromagnetic (EM) and magnetoelectric (ME) types of mediator fields exhibiting a special type of 'mirror principle' relationship between them," and I proposed that Tiller and Milgrom battle it out in a steel cage match to see whose woo is strongest. It's now three years later, and Tiller is back with more ammunition to use to prove whose woo reigns supreme, and all I can say is: Wow, maaaaan! Check out the title: On Understanding the Very Different Science Premises Meaningful to CAM Versus Orthodox Medicine: Part I--The Fundamentals.
You can tell right away that Tiller is going to make stuff up by the very title! Notice how he makes a dichotomy of "very different science premises" needed to be "meaningful" to CAM. In the real world, science is science. Different disciplines of science don't need "very different science premises" to be "meaningful" to them. The scientific method is the scientific method. There may be different ways of applying the scientific method necessitated by different disciplines and different situations, but certain core principles always remain regardless of the specific scientific discipline, principles such as hypothesis testing and falsification. Not so, apparently, in woo world! You get a flavor of this right from the abstract:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 8:00 AM • 83 Comments
March 15, 2010
Category: Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine
While I'm crashing idiotic Internet polls, I might as well see if I can send some tactical air support over to Steve Salzberg, who wrote an excellent blog post about the Autism Omnibus ruling that I just wrote about earlier today.
Steve's blog post is entitled Vaccine Court Ruling: Thimerosal Does Not Cause Autism, and the Generation Rescue contingent of the anti-vaccine movement has already descended in force, including J.B. Handley and Anne Dachel, who are regurgitating the usual river of flaming stupid in the form of anti-vaccine talking points. Looks like a job for some Orac-style Insolence...
Posted by Orac at 3:00 PM • 46 Comments
Category: Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Politics • Quackery
Perhaps you've heard of the case of Poul Thorsen. Perhaps not. Either way, that anti-vaccine movement was making a huge deal over this Danish psychiatrist and researcher for two reasons. First, he has become embroiled in some sort of scandal involving research funds at his former place of employment, Aarhus University, leading the ever-hyperbolic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to post a characteristic bit of conspiracy mongering nonsense to that font of anti-vaccine nonsense, The Huffington Post, in an article entitled Central figure in CDC Vaccine Cover-Up Absconds with $2M. The second reason is implicit in the title, namely that Thorsen was a coauthor on two important studies from Denmark supporting the safety of vaccines and refuting a correlation with autism, one published in the New England Journal of Medicine and dealing with the MMR vaccine and the other published in the journal Pediatrics and failing to show a link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism.
Guilty or not, the anti-vaccine movement has pulled out all the stops in its smear machine in order to make it look as though Thorsen was the main researcher behind these two studies, the latter of which is particularly despised by the mercury militia. Being retrospective, the latter study (Madsen et al) is not without flaws, but it is not nearly as bad as anti-vaccine crusaders paint it. In fact, it's pretty darned good. Of course, Thorsen was nothing of the sort; he was listed only as sixth and fourth author on the NEJM and Pediatrics studies, respectively, and the lead author on both studies has stated that his role on both studies was modest at best. However, the truth was never an obstacle to the anti-vaccine movement, and they have labored overtime to paint Thorsen as central to the case against thimerosal in vaccines as being a major cause of autism.
At first, I couldn't figure out why. I thought I had an idea, given that anti-vaccine prophet Andrew Wakefield had fallen so ignominiously over the month preceding the revelations about Thorsen's possible criminal activity. At the time, I thought that the antivaccine movement was desperate and looking for someone on "our side" to attack, hoping that by arguing that someone involved with the Danish studies was involved in unethical and possibly illegal activity they could both distract attention from Wakefield's being discredited and make the fallacious claim that investigators who have failed to find correlations between vaccines and autism or vaccines and thimerosal-containing vaccines are just as bad as any accusation against Wakefield.
I now know that I was wrong.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 84 Comments
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine
Of course, the best way to decide such questions is to vote, right?
I know, I know, I've complained about poll-crashing before, but, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Posted by Orac at 12:00 AM • 66 Comments
March 14, 2010
Category: Blogging • Humor • Science
...about the internecine warfare that breaks out from time to time around ScienceBlogs. At times we do appear to be a lot like professional wrestling.
Can you find Orac in there?
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 21 Comments
Orac is the nom de blog of a (not so) humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. (Continued 
