"A statement of fact cannot be insolent." The miscellaneous ramblings of a surgeon/scientist on medicine, quackery, science, pseudoscience, history, and pseudohistory (and anything else that interests him)
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 here, along with a DISCLAIMER that you should read before reading any medical discussions here.)
I love Mitchell and Webb, and this is just one reason why. They totally get homeopathy, as this video e-mailed to me by a reader demonstrates:
Pay close attention to the signs in the A & E. Too bad this is too late for Homeopathy Awareness Week.
And they're funny, to boot. While I'm on the subject of homeopathy, I know I've posted it before, but it's never wrong to repost an oldie but goody, the classic Homeopathic E.R.:
Here in the States, it's one of those rare long holiday weekends spanning Friday through Sunday instead of the usual Saturday through Monday. Because I'm working on a couple of papers and a grant, as well as polishing up a talk I have to give next week, posting will probably be light. I will, however, have to find time to torture one of the quack cancer cure websites that have been popping up in ScienceBlogs' ads. In fact, I think I'll just keep doing that until the ads are gone.
I may be a little late to the party, but that's because my laptop happens to have ad blocking software installed. However, blog bud PalMD rubbed my nose into a little kerfuffle that's been going on here the last couple of days. Basically, some really, really bad advertisements have been popping up. Ads for quackery like this popped up:
Lovely. Here I am pointing out why the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy is an unethical boondoggle of a quackfest, full of violations of the most basic protections for human subjects, and what's appearing above my post?
Ads for chelation therapy! And I saw an ad for chelation therapy on the sidebar again a mere couple of hours ago. I haven't seen any since then, but having seen them so recently, I have to assume that these ads are still popping up.
There's even worse, though. As Isis, Zuska, and GrrlScientist pointed out, there were ads for Russian mail order brides. Ads for quackery are bad enough, but ads that can contribute to human trafficking are even worse than that. Apparently they came about when a new ad service was hired. Obviously, there was a failure to communicate or implement proper guidelines and filtering for these ads. Whatever the case, they've riled both our readers and many of us bloggers, and rightly so! How can Orac, scourge of quacks, tolerate having his peerless prose seen next to ads for chelation therapy? I've been castigating chelation therapy since my days back on Blogspot, long before I even joined ScienceBlogs.
The Seed Overlords are aware of this and assure us that these ads will be eliminated. I certainly hope so. When I first joined ScienceBlogs, one thing that I made very clear is that I couldn't be associated with ads for pseudoscience or quackery. I'm willing to take our Overlords at their word and give them some time to make things right. They've been benevolent Overlords thus far. I also understand that times are tough, and ScienceBlogs is ad-supported. That's why I am generally not excessively picky about the advertising that supports this blog. There are limits, though, and even in these touh economic times ads for quackery and mail order brides are not acceptable.. However, if these ads persist, I may be forced into a decision that I don't want to have to make.
Let's hope that doesn't happen. Certainly I am. I just hope the ad staff and techies haven't taken off for the 4th of July weekend. My tolerance will be zero by Monday.
Next up in two weeks is Effort Sisyphus. Be sure to start firing up your keyboards to provide the raw material, namely great skeptical blogging, to make next week's carnival as good as this week or even better. The contact information is here, and guidelines can be found here.
Finally, if you're a skeptical blogger, maybe you'd like to have a go at hosting one of these puppies. You won't regret it. Just check out the guidelines for hosts and the current hosting schedule. If you think you have what it takes, drop me a line, and I'll work you into the lineup.
Last year, a seeming victory for the protection of human subjects from being subjected to pseudoscience. It began when Kimball C. Atwood IV, MD; Elizabeth Woeckner, AB, MA; Robert S. Baratz, MD, DDS, PhD; and Wallace I. Sampson, MD published a lengthy criticism of the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) in Medscape, pointing out that it was a boondoggle that was not only not based on sound science but was in fact risky to patients and riddled with conflicts of interest and administered by highly dubious practitioners. If you want to know just how bad the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) could go in terms of studying quackery and doing a very poor job of it, it's really worth reading the entire article. Of course, I will concede that TACT wasn't entirely NCCAM's fault. Its scientific advisory board voted against funding it because, it concluded, there was an insufficient scientific basis. Unfortunately, quackery fan and antivaccine zealot Representative Dan Burton applied pressure, and suddenly NCCAM did have $30 million after all to fund this study. The article by Atwood et al is really, really long, but worth reading, as is, I would humbly posit, my discussion of the issue. As a result, in September the NIH decided to suspend TACT until the allegations in the article could be more carefully investigated.
In the meantime, woo-meisters everywhere mounted a counterattack against the Medscape article. Perhaps most hilarious of these was an article published in, so very appropriately, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons by Beth Clay entitled Study of Chelation Therapy Should Not Be Abandoned. Harriet Hall did a comprehensive takedown of the misinformation contained in this article; so I won't go into detail. Suffice it to say that it was a perfect article to publish in JPANDS. Indeed, it went beyond the normally high level of crankery that JPANDS promotes. I can boil down Ms. Clay's points very easily:
Earlier this year, I wrote about Senator Tom Harkin's attempt to hijack President Obama's health care reform plans in order to inject quackery in the form of "alternative" or "integrative" medicine into the effort. Specifically, he wants to legitimize quackery by including it in any federal plan under the guise of "preventative care." He even went so far as to invite the Four Horsement of the Woopocalypse into the Senate to testify and castigate the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine for being too scientific and not proving that any of his favored woo works. Of course, his latest antics are merely the latest in a long line of his support for quackery. After all, he's the Senator who, more than anyone else, is responsible for the scientific atrocity that is NCCAM, starting with the Office of Unconventional Medicine 17 years ago, which he nurtured as it grew into the Office of Alternative Medicine and ultimately into the woo juggernaut that it is now.
We haven't heard much from Harkin lately, but, have no fear. He's still hard at work on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee pushing "wellness" and "prevention," which in Harkin-speak are codewords for everything from the reasonable (diet and exercise) to complete quackery, and he's doing it totally under the radar. For example, buried in a news report on the Senate's work on the massive 600-page health care reform bill, along with measures on malpractice and other issues, is this little gem:
She's the CBS reporter who can really bring home the crazy when it comes to vaccines and autism, laying down some serious crankery (complete with many logical fallacies) and hit pieces on Dr. Paul Offit. Indeed, at times she gives Mike Adams a run for his money when it comes to laying down the pseudoscience and crankery. Worse, she appears to be in bed with at least one of the bloggers at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism for the purpose of bringing antivaccination lunacy to the masses by assisting them in smearing Voices for Vaccines. Indeed, aside from Steve Wilson, I can't recall a reporter for a mainstream news outlet who regularly sides with the anti-vaccine movement and helps them promote their propaganda, and the bad thing is that she's national.
I have to be honest. I didn't know if this was just a single blind spot on Attkisson's part. There are many people who appear perfectly reasonable--and, in fact, are perfectly reasonable in most areas--but have a major blind spot in just one area. On the other hand, the principle of crank magnetism observes that people who are prone to one area of pseudoscience and crankery are very often attracted to other areas of pseudoscience and crankery. The reason is that they have no mental filter. The same defects in their reasoning and critical thinking abilities that lead them to fall for one form of woo leave them open to many forms of woo. So, is Attkisson prone to crank magnetism?
You betcha.
She's back repeating bad science that purports to have found that aluminum containing antiperspirants cause cancer. It's a bad, bad, bad report. In fact, it's as bad as anything Attkisson's ever written about vaccines. (Well, almost as bad.) Get a load of this:
I knew it was coming. It had to. History was on my side. My quarry was nutty, but in a way exceedingly predictable. it wasn't so much that I knew exactly what he would do. He wasn't predictable in that way. It was that I knew he would do something crazy. Actually, on second thought, I did know what he was going to do. I had only to consider how ghoulishly he treated Tony Snow and Bernie Mac, and Tim Russert and how he leapt at the opportunity to abuse Christina Applegate. To him, when a dying celebrity like Patrick Swayze rejected quackery, it was more than he could stand. Whenever celebrities suffer from serious diseases cancer and especially when they die, he is there, looking for any opening to blame their suffering and death on that evil "allopathic" scientific medicine. And there were two major deaths last week. Both were big, but one was really, really big. I'm talking Elvis big. Best of all for him, one of them died of cancer and the other died mysteriously.
I knew my quarry would have a hard time resisting one of them, but I knew there was no way he could resist the death of both.
That's right. You guessed it. That quack promoter supreme, that man for whom no quackery is too wild or improbable to embrace wholeheartedly, that master of hyperbole and lover of bad Hitler analogies and even worse cartoons, Mike Adams, creator of NaturalNews.com, has decided to apply his investigatory prowess to the recent deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, labeling them "the latest celebrity victims of big pharma." Let me tell you, it's vintage Adams, which means it's vintage alt-med crazy turned up not just to 11 but to 20 and beyond:
(NaturalNews) That Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett both died in the last 48 hours is shocking news to many, but it's not nearly as surprising as the fact that they were both killed by Big Pharma's toxic drugs.
Do you understand why, although I despise the message Adams promotes, I still can't help but check his website from time and derive enormous entertainment value from the sheer looniness found there. Looniness like this:
I have been where a lot of those families are. While $25 may not seem like a hell of a lot to most people, when you are to the point where you have to ration your eating to five or six meals a week, to ensure your children get enough to eat, that works out to being a lot of meals you will miss that month. And I can also attest, trying to functionally work when you're only eating one meal, ever day or so is not easy and certainly not healthy. These are folks who cannot afford to lose a single damned dime. And so there are a lot of kids not getting the vaccines that will not only keep them safe - they keep their communities safe too.
And so as bad as things are right now, I managed to throw down $25 dollars and will sleep somewhat more soundly tonight, knowing that I just ensured that a child in Nevada who wouldn't have been vaccinated will be now. And dammit, if I can manage that, what can you manage?
An excellent question. What can you manage? DuWayne reminded me that I'm in the very fortunate position where it's been a long time since $25 represented much money to me at all. Not everyone is so lucky. In fact, to a lot of people, $25 is a lot of money.
This is just a brief followup to my post this morning about yesterday's NYT article on cancer research. An excellent discussion of the NYT article can be found here (and is well worth reading in its entirety). In it, Jim Hu did something I should have done, namely check the CRISP database in addition to PubMed. A couple of key points follow about the examples cited in the NYT article.
Regarding Dennis Slamon:
I hate to criticize Dennis Slamon, because the HER2 to Herceptin story is a great one. But the image one gets of his research program being saved by a friend from Revlon while the NCI ignored him isn't consistent with what you get when you search for his grants in the CRISP database. Slamon got an NCI grant in 1984 to work on "oncogenes in physiologic and pathologic states". Two NCI grants are cited in the 1987 Science paper showing HER-2 amplification in breast cancer (one was probably for the collaborator's lab), and he's been pretty continuously funded by NCI since then. So I'd love to know what this story applies to.
Me too. Regarding Ellen Jaffe:
Eileen Jaffe has studied the enzymology of porphobilinogen synthase under a 20-year multiply renewed grant from the National Institutes for Environmental and Health Sciences. Recently, she's been working on an idea called morpheeins, which she's patented as the basis for drug discovery. I have no idea what was in the grant, but what I see doesn't scream "missed opportunity to cure cancer" at me.
Which was my thought, too, looking at her publication record. Finally, regarding Louise R. Howe's studies on signaling and cancer:
The plan, said the investigator, Louise R. Howe, an associate research professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, is first to confirm her hypothesis about the pathway in breast cancer cells. But even if it is correct, the much harder research would lie ahead because no drugs exist to block the pathway, and even if they did, there are no assurances that they would be safe.
I have no idea what Kolata has against Dr. Howe's project. The same could have been said about HER2 in 1987.
Or about any number of oncogenes and targeted therapies. Yikes! The same could be said about what I'm working on. Oh, no, that must mean I'm not sufficiently innovative for Kolata's taste...
A couple of weeks ago, NEWSWEEK science columnist Sharon Begley wrote an article entitled From Bench To Bedside: Academia slows the search for cures. It was a rather poorly argued bit of polemic, backed up only with anecdotes that came across as sour grapes by scientists whose grant proposals the NIH had decided not to fund, and based on many misconceptions she had regarding basic science versus translational research, journal impact factors, and how journals actually determine what they will publish. Not suprisingly, Begley's article caught flak from others, including Mike the Mad Biologist, Tim KreiderSteve Novella, and, of course, yours truly, who laid down some serious Respectful Insolence upon the entire article--and deservedly so, I might add.
To follow up on the same theme, an article appeared on the front page of the New York Times yesterday proclaiming that the NIH is "playing it too safe" when it comes to funding cancer research. Basically, it is a variant of the same complaints I've heard time and time again. Now, don't get me wrong. By no means am I saying that the current system that the NIH uses to determine which scientists get funded is without problems or a well-oiled machine. Those who complain that the system is often too conservative have a point. The problem, all too often, however, is that the proposals for how to fix the problem are usually either never spelled out or rest on dubious assumptions about the nature of cancer research--indeed, of research itself. Indeed, the NYT article strikes me as simply "Why are we losing the war on cancer?" 2009 edition. In fact, they look like more than that. As Mike the Mad Biologist speculates, one has to wonder if there is some sort of coordinated effort to pressure the government to change the policies at the NCI to be more nurturing of "risky" projects.
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 
