May 9, 2008
Category: Alternative medicine • Friday Woo • Medicine • Quackery • Skepticism/critical thinking
Last week's woo was pretty darned hard to top, don't you think? It had it all, after all: Boner potentiation, penis enlargement, magnets, near infrared, and more. The only thing it lacked that would have made it absolutely perfect woo were references to pseudoscientific "vibration" or, even better, quantum theory. That's the reason I could only give it a 9.5/10 rather than a perfect score of 10/10. All I can say is: Better luck next time.
In looking for something that could at least live up to last week, if not surpass it, I was surprised that there actually was such a link in my ever-reliable Folder of Woo. Even better, it was yet another form of woo that I've somehow managed to miss in this nearly two year odyssey into the depths of pseudoscience, spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, and, of course, woo. But what, you my intrepid readers might ask, could possibly match last week's peerless descent into vulgarity. You'll see soon enough, and you'll get your opportunity to decide for yourself whether or not it is worthy of a Friday installment.
One of the key characteristics of a whole large subcategory of woo is, as any connoisseur of woo knows, "natural" sorts of remedies. The reason, of course, is that if it's natural it must be better for you than any big pharma-manufactured abomination against nature. Or so the woo-meisters tell us anyway. Certainly curare is incredibly healthy, as is strychnine, deadly nightshade. Oh, wait, they're deadly poisons. Well, what about taxol, which comes from the bark of the Pacific Yew tree? Not a bad example, given its effectiveness against various cancers, especially breast cancer, except that big pharma had to go and make is so that women don't have to chew on bark to get all that natural goodness. Instead, it had to go and defile the tree and extract all the anticancer goodness into a product that has to be injected IV. Oh, well.
But that doesn't mean that plants aren't our friend from a woo point of view. Besides, it's not enough that a natural substance derived form plants function through old-fashioned pharmacological actions, such as binding to a receptor, interfering with an enzyme, or activating a signaling pathway. Oh, no. That's materialistic and unimaginative! If I'm going to use plants to cure diseaes, I'd want them to do something far cooler and more...energetic. Fortunately, I've found just the thing! Actually, Dr. Brent W. Davis has. Indeed, he's found a way to extract the essence of living plants and harness its power for for your--yes, your!--health. Before we see his creation, let's introduce you to him:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 21 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Announcements • Blog carnivals • Skepticism/critical thinking • Skeptics' Circle
Sometimes being a skeptic can be a real bitch. And no one knows that better than the host of the latest installment of a blog carnival that has, believe it or not, been running over three years now, the ever-popular Skepbitch. She's served up a heaping helping of the best skeptical bitching from the last two weeks. Head on over and enjoy!
Next up to host is Action Skeptics on May 22. If you're a blogger, start getting your best skeptical posts ready to submit for the next Skeptics' Circle.
Finally, as always, if you're interested in hosting, check out the schedule and guidelines, as well as the guidelines for hosts, and then drop me a line. I'll check out your blog to make sure that you at least sometimes post skeptical content using critical thinking and that you don't have a secret crush on Sylvia Browne, and then get you on the schedule.
Posted by Orac at 12:00 AM • 2 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 8, 2008
Category: Cancer • Medicine
Although there are a lot of medical bloggers out there, there's always room for more good blogging, particularly if it's related to basic and translational research. That's why the Cancer Research UK Science Update blog is worth checking out. It's actually been around a while as an internal blog, but now it's "gone public," so to speak, allowing readers to check out its older posts. I encourage my readers to take a look.
Posted by Orac at 4:00 PM • 1 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Cancer • Clinical trials • Medicine • Surgery
In science- and evidence-based medicine, the evaluation of surgical procedures represents a unique challenge that is qualitatively different from the challenges in medical specialties. Perhaps the most daunting of these challenges is that it is often either logistically impossible or unethical to do the gold-standard clinical trial, a double-blind, randomized placebo trial, to test the efficacy of an operation. After all, the "placebo" in a surgical trial involves exposing patients to anaesthesia, making an incision or incisions like the ones used for the operation under study, and then intentionally not doing the actual operation. Even leaving the ethics aside, it's impossible to blind the surgeons and operative team involved to which treatment, real surgery or placebo, the patient is receiving without having a different surgeon do the surgery from the one overseeing the postoperative care of the patient, with the operative surgeon barred from communicating to the postoperative surgeon what happened in the operating room and from participating in the postoperative care of the patient upon whom he operated. This sort of restriction, besides being also highly dubious on an ethical basis, goes against the grain of surgical culture, in which a surgeon is expected to provide the postoperative care for his patients as a matter of surgical honor. A final problem that complicates any surgical trial is that surgeons of differing technical operating skill will necessarily be involved, and surgical skill is indeed very important in determining outcome. Although there have been examples of double-blinded trials with sham surgery as placebo, for example, in injecting dopamine-producing cells into the brain to treat Parkinson's disease, difficulties doing such studies tend to force us as surgeons in many cases either to rely on retrospective data, prospective non-randomized data, or, when we're lucky, a prospective randomized (but not double-blinded) trial of one surgical procedure versus another.
Despite these difficulties, there have nonetheless been some great successes in applying rigorous science to the evaluation of surgical procedures. One of these examples comes from my own primary specialty: breast surgery. As recently as 30-40 years ago, most women with breast cancer were still subjected to radical mastectomies as originally pioneered by William Halsted in 1882. The radical mastectomy is a disfiguring operation that involves removing the underlying pectoralis major muscle along with the breast and axillary lymph nodes (the lymph nodes under the arm). The radical mastectomy is, as its name implies, a very radical procedure. It also results in considerable morbidity, which led to the search for less radical alternatives. The first of these was the "modified radical" mastectomy, which was essentially the same operation without the removal of the pectoralis major muscle. Then the question of whether it was necessary to remove the entire breast was examined, and there followed the concept of "lumpectomy" or "partial mastectomy" for small tumors. Consequently, in 1976, a rigorous trial was undertaken by the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) to look at this question. The study, NSABP-B06 was designed to determine in patients with or without clinical axillary node involvement who may be amenable to segmental mastectomy (SM or lumpectomy) whether:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 10 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 7, 2008
Category: Biology • Evolution • Science
...and suddenly he reveals his true stripes.
Oh, well, at least the Hitler Zombie hasn't eaten Jason's brain, as he has so many of the others who complain about being Expelled!
Yet.
Thanks, Jason. I needed the laugh after the events of yesterday and today. Oh, and congratulations on getting tenure!
Posted by Orac at 6:00 PM • 1 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
...because Dr. Roy Kerry, the negligent physician who killed an autistic child with chelation therapy and against whom criminal charges were dropped yesterday, wants to go back to work:
Dr. Roy Kerry, 70, of Sharpsville, read from a prepared statement today at the Butler offices of his attorney, Al Lindsay, but would not answer questions on the advice of his other lawyers. Kerry still faces a civil suit over the death of Abubaker Tariq Nadama, and a hearing on the future of his medical license.
"I plan to continue my life's work helping many patients with serious illnesses with the highest quality of advanced integrative medical care that I can offer," Kerry said.
The very sad thing is that, like Dr. Rashid Buttar, I'm reluctantly betting that Dr. Kerry will probably manage to do just that without much interference from the State of Pennsylvania. (Go back to work, that is; not help any patients or provide anything hear the "highest quality" of care, "conventional" or "integrative." He's already proven that he's incapable of providing high quality "integrative" care, given that he can't even give chelation therapy reasonably safely.) Let's really, really hope that Pennsylvania's medical board acts quickly and strips Dr. Kerry of his license or that he's forced to settle the malpractice suit against him for such a high sum of money that he becomes uninsurable. Of course, if that happens, then Arizona might be the next state to have to worry about Dr. Kerry. A few weeks of "training," and he'd be good to go as a "homeopath" there.
One line of this story caught my eye though:
District Attorney Richard Goldinger said he asked the court Tuesday for permission to drop charges of involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment against Kerry after new evidence was presented by his defense. He did not specify what information lead to the decision.
I really, really would love to know what that "new" evidence is. How much does anyone want to bet that antivaccinationists will somehow try to link mitochondrial disorders to Tariq's death, based on the Hannah Poling case?
Posted by Orac at 4:10 PM • 7 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
Longtime readers of this blog probably remember the tragic case of Abubakar Tariq Nadama, the five-year-old autistic boy who died as a result of being treated with chelation therapy three years ago by Dr. Roy Kerry, an otolaryngologist who had apparently had given up doing head and neck surgery in favor of the more lucrative pastures of woo. This case was about as clear as a case could get. A known potential complication of chelation therapy is a lowering of calcium levels in the blood, to the point that cardiac arrhythmias and cardiac arrest can occur. Moreover, children are more sensitive than adults to this potential complication, and the autopsy clearly concluded that Tariq had . But did that stop Dr. Kerry? Sadly, no, it did not. But not only did he give a drug for an invalid indication (disodium EDTA for autism), but he incompetently gave it IV push instead of over time, leading to a rapid drop in blood serum calcium levels and cardiac arrest. Negligent incompetence just doesn't get any more obvious than this in medicine.
Indeed, so egregious was this case that last summer the Butler county prosecutor did something that's very, very rare in cases of a patient death due to physician incompetence. He actually decided to file criminal charges against Dr. Kerry for involuntary manslaughter. Before going on, I would ask you to read the charges against Dr. Kerry filed by the Pennsylvania State Board of Medicine. The description of Tariq's last moments is chilling, as is the callousness with which he was treated, being stuck multiple times for an IV treatment that has no hope of alleviating his autistic symptoms.
Unfortunately, the prosecutor has decided to drop all criminal charges:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 23 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Humor • Politics
Too bad this woman forgot a cardinal rule about making signs boosting English as the official language of the U.S.:
Sorry, I saw this picture and just couldn't resist...
Hat tip, though, to Orcinus, who reminded me of this other example of a protester who could use a little remedial English:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 12:00 AM • 34 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 6, 2008
Category: Alternative medicine • Medicine • Quackery
Since I'm almost never home in time to see the 6:30 PM news, it's unlikely I'll be seeing this series on NBC news about the "mind-body" connection when it airs, although I'll search for video later when I get a chance. Apparently I missed this last night:
When we were planning this week's series "the Mind Body Connection," Alex Wallace the executive producer of Nightly News asked me what was new with the alternative medicine movement, which has been in full swing for more than a decade.
The answer is that a handful of billionaires have brought alternative medicine into many the nation's major medical centers, long the bastion of opposition. The new approach is called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or integrative medicine. Tonight we profile the program at Duke where meditation, massage, biofeedback, and acupuncture among other alternative approaches are offered along with conventional medicine.
John Mack, the CEO of Morgan Stanley gave the money to set up the Duke facility. His wife Christy, the daughter of a physician, has long been a proponent of integrating alternative and mainstream medicine.
Other donors have set up similar programs at Harvard and the hospitals of the University of California in San Francisco and Irvine. The goal of these programs is to establish a model for medicine of the future focusing on wellness instead of disease.
Yes, that does appear to be the difference, although the whole schtick about a model for medicine "focusing on wellness instead of disease" is a big, fat, steaming load of B.S., because, its denunciations of "conventional" medicine and bold claims for promoting health notwithstanding, "focusing on wellness" is not what most so-called CAM therapies do. There's also the issue of insurance, which generally doesn't pay for treatments without at least a modicum of high quality evidence that it works better than a placebo, meaning that CAM services bring in good, old-fashioned, cold hard cash on the barrelhead without all that nasty mucking about with insurance company claims.
Dr. Bazell does characterize the CAM movement correctly:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 2:03 PM • 13 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Clinical trials • Medicine • Quackery
I've lamented time and time again just how much money the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) wastes on basic research and clinical trials of modalities that are, from a scientific viewpoint, so highly implausible that the chances of finding a clinically useful or relevant--or even a consistent statistically significant--effect (for example, homeopathy or reiki) or on therapies for which there is already abundant negative evidence (chelation therapy, for example) are vanishingly small. In this fifth year of a flat or declining NIH budget and of scientists facing the most unfavorable paylines for getting funded since the early 1990s, it strikes me as utterly irresponsible to be devoting over $120 million a year to mostly badly designed studies to test if woo works.
Sadly, what I didn't know until fairly recently is that NCCAM isn't the only source of NIH money going to fund woo. There is in fact an Institute in the NIH that actually spends more money studying woo than NCCAM. Indeed, in FY 2007, it spend $121,932,765 million on CAM-related research, funding 461 projects in the form of grants, cooperative agreements, supplements or contracts, compared to the $121,400,000 spent by NCCAM. Really, it's true, and its CAM portfolio represents 2.5% of its total budget. So what is this Institute funding lots of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)? Can you guess? I'll be happy to tell you.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 18 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 5, 2008
Category: Bioethics • Cancer • Medicine
OK, I know it's like the post calling the kettle black, but what the heck is PalMD doing blogging on vacation? And are his two most recent posts so good? This is what I mean:
I recently had the unfortunate opportunity to visit a relative in hospice. I was incredibly impressed. Nice, well-appointed rooms, with a caring, attentive staff that did everything in its power to keep the dying as comfortable and free of distress, both physical and emotional, as humans can do. As a cancer surgeon, I've been involved with a number of patients who went to hospice, and I can only hope that the hospices they ended up going to were as good as this one.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 2:33 PM • 4 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Medicine • Politics • Religion • Science
That's the message that Ben Stein has been pushing lately, namely not just the hated "Darwinism" but science itself inevitably leads to political philosophies such as Nazi-ism and Stalinism (but especially Nazi-ism, given its emphasis on racial hygiene and eugenics), including the mass murder that resulted from them. As a result, Stein has been correctly and deservedly excoriated not just by science bloggers, but even by fellow conservatives such as Instapundit, who characterized Stein as "totally having lost it," and John Derbyshire, who correctly characterized Stein's lies as a blood libel on our civilization. I didn't think there was anyone out there other than religious nuts who would try to defend Stein's vile thesis. So, it was much to my surprise that I somehow came across this gem of idiocy in which a blogger going by the 'nym ctl blogging at Dean's World, while trying to sound rational and reason-based, has unintentionally offered perhaps the dumbest, most incoherent defense of Ben Stein that I've seen. It's serves up a neuron-apoptosing panoply of of stereotypes about scientists, bad arguments, and straw men. Truly, ctl owes me some of my dead neurons back. At least if I have a glass or two of wine and it kills a few neurons I get some pleasure out of the deal. Not so here, which is perhaps the reason I felt compelled to offer up a much-deserved dose of not-so-Respectful Insolenceâ„¢ on this tripe.
The piece starts out in the gutter and descends from there:
Of course science leads you to killing people. It's generally not scientists who do the killing, of course. As a group, scientists (being academics) are probably among the most physically cowardly of our species, and are therefore among the most gentle. While it's true that politicians who start wars rarely themselves fire shots in anger in those wars, science doesn't generally lead to killing in a direct manner, such as by proposing a theory that someone needs to die.
Science leads you to killing people because the scientific method is inherently amoral (note: amoral, not immoral). In itself, that's fine. Many activities, if not most, are inherently amoral. The problem is that science is like candy. Candy doesn't normally contain anything really bad for you, and certainly sugar is a necessary part of the human diet. Candy becomes bad for you when it pushes out all of the other foods that you might eat, and then it's only bad for you because you're not eating anything else.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 95 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 4, 2008
Category: Announcements • Blog housekeeping • Blogging
Forgive me if you find bloggers trumpeting their traffic numbers to be painfully boring. Truth be told, sometimes I find them boring too. However, I hope you'll indulge me just this once, given that regular readers know how rarely I do posts dedicated to discussing my traffic. (Just remember that blogging is an exercise in ego gratification, anyway.) It's just that March and April have been the best two months ever in terms of traffic on this blog, and I can't resist taking a moment to post about it. Just take a look:
In March, there were 128,996 visits to Respectful Insolence, and in April there were 141,614 visits. That's well over a quarter of a million visits in just two months and shatters the previous record traffic month in July 2007. I have to admit that I'm utterly floored. True, it may not be much compared to a certain other ScienceBlogger here, who happens to generate more than ten times my traffic, but to me it's huge.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 11:09 AM • 19 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Announcements • Blog carnivals • Skepticism/critical thinking • Skeptics' Circle
Time's flying by once again.
You know, the longer I serve as the organizer of this great endeavor that I did not start, namely The Skeptics' Circle, the more it amazes me just how good it routinely is. It also amazes me just how fast time flies between editions. This time around is no exception. Already, the next edition is due in a mere four days, on May 8, 2008. This time around, the host will be The Skepbitch. Besides having an utterly awesome name for her blog, the Skepbitch is--well--a skeptic. In fact, so dedicated is she that she was willing to subject herself to a lecture by Sylvia Browne in the cause of skepticism. (Talk about taking one for the team!)
So, please, help the Skepbitch out in her endeavor of wanting to bring you the most awesome Skeptics' Circle yet seen. Send her your best skeptical blogging by May 7. Do it now. You know you want to. Then join us back at The Skepbitch on May 8 for a roundup of the best skeptical blogging out there.
Posted by Orac at 12:00 AM • 0 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 3, 2008
Category: Anti-Semitism • Biology • History • Hitler Zombie • Holocaust • Intelligent design/creationism • Medicine • Pseudoscience • Science • Skepticism/critical thinking • World War II
Does anyone remember a few months ago, when I wrote about Ben Stein? No? Here, then, I'll jog your memory. Ben Stein and his involvment in that piece of cinematic excrement Expelled! "inspired" me to--if you'll excuse the term--resurrect a certain recurring character from the very early days of this blog. Yes, I'm talking about the ever-dreaded Hitler Zombie, who returned after more than a year's absence to take a huge chomp out of Ben Stein's brain.
Now we're seeing the results of that chomp, and I'm not just talking about the ridiculous claims in Expelled! that "Darwinism" leads inevitably to Nazi-ism and the Holocaust. No, according to Stein, it's not just Darwinism that leads to Nazi-ism that leads to the gas chambers and ovens. Get a load of what Ben Stein has said explicitly in an interview with Paul Crouch on the Trinity Broadcasting Network:
Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. [PZ] Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed.
...
Stein (speaking about the Holocaust): ...that was horrifying beyond words, and that's where science -- in my opinion, this is just an opinion -- that's where science leads you.
Crouch: That's right.
Stein: ... Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.
That's right. To Stein, it's not just evolution (or, as he likes to call it, "Darwinism") that leads to the gas chambers. It's science itself. Words fail me to describe the depths of stupid that Stein plumbs here. "The stupid, it burns" and the many variants of it that I like to use are all far too impotent a condemnation of such ignorance.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 11:02 AM • 44 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
Good news!
In the wake of having his fishing expedition of a subpoena against autism blogger Kathleen Seidel quashed, it would appear that lawyer to the mercury militia Clifford Shoemaker and his clients Seth and Lisa Sykes have decided to voluntarily dismiss their lawsuit against Bayer and no longer pursue it.
Of course, that brings up the question of just what the heck Shoemaker's attempts to dragoon unrelated parties such as Kathleen Seidel and Dr. Marie McCormick into the proceedings with dubious subpoenas was supposed to accomplish. Were such actions a sign of increasing desperation, a parting shot against people the Sykes didn't like, or a little of both? Either way, there was no excuse for such legal thuggery.
Here's hoping the Sykes can put this behind them, stop blaming vaccines for their child's autism, and get back to the business of taking care of their child, a task for which I only wish them the best even despite their hooking up with an ambulance chaser like Shoemaker.
Posted by Orac at 1:37 AM • 10 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Orac is the nom de blog of a 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 
