October 6, 2008
Category: Announcements • Skeptics' Circle
...with the 97th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which is due to be hosted at Evolved and Rational on Thursday, October 9. That's less than three days away, folks. There's still a couple of days left to get your skeptical entries submitted to Evolved Rationalist. So, if you've procrastinated thus far, remember that time's running out.
Then join us all at Evolved and Rational on Thursday for a sampling of the best the skeptical blogosphere has to offer over the last couple of weeks.
Posted by Orac at 2:24 PM • 0 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Cancer • Medicine • Quackery
Sometimes I have to look for blog ideas, trolling through various alternative medicine sites, medical news sites, or science news feeds or my medical and science journals. Sometimes ideas fall on me seemingly out of the blue. This is one of the latter situations. This time around, as I do twice a month I was perusing the very latest issue of Cancer Research, hot off the presses October 1. As I did so, it didn't take me long to come across an article from the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia entitled Vitamin C Antagonizes the Cytotoxic Effects of Antineoplastic Drugs, whose first author is Dr. Mark Heaney.
I didn't think I'd be revisiting this topic again so soon. After all, I wrote one of my characteristic magnum opuses (opi?) less than two months ago, when I asked whether a recent animal study had vindicated Linus Pauling's belief that high dose vitamin C is a highly effective cancer treatment. That was more than two years after my last magnum opus about this topic. But this latest study examined an aspect of the vitamin C phenomenon that I hadn't considered before. In fact, it found results that I had not seen reported before.
Given that, how could I resist throwing myself once more into the fray?
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 10:00 AM • 7 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Computers • Entertainment/culture • Medicine • Quackery • Television
As you may remember, the evening after the Hollywood face of the antivaccine P.R. machine Jenny McCarthy was scheduled to take part in a web chat. At the time, I suggested sending questions in to the Oprah website, to see if any would get through. I'm sure there was some serious screening and vetting of possible questions; so I suggested trying to word them in such a way as to indicate Jenny's ignorance without triggering the censors. Apparently never was heard a discouraging word in the web chat (big surprise there), but apparently one rather clever wag did manage to get a question through:
Heh. Obviously a fan of cheesy 1980s pop music was behind this! In case you don't know, this is what Rickrolling is.
Posted by Orac at 7:20 AM • 12 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
October 5, 2008
Category: Humor • Politics
I'm still buried working on next week's talk and my part of the center grant. Fortunately, Saturday Night Live provides some temporary entertainment until I can get out from under the pile. Once again Tina Fey nails it, especially the "maverick" part. While watching the debate last week, by the end I thought I was going to throw something at the TV screen if I heard Palin refer to herself and McCain as "mavericks" again.
I know, I know, this is becoming a bit of a habit. Don't worry, though. I have something nearly finished for tomorrow, and I see a light at the end of the tunnel next week. At least for a while.
Posted by Orac at 10:07 AM • 7 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
October 4, 2008
Category: Alternative medicine • Entertainment/culture • Humor • Medicine • Music • Paranormal • Pseudoscience • Quackery • Skepticism/critical thinking
Unfortunately, I'm going to be ensconced in my Sanctum Sanctorum most of the day, pounding out text far less fun than the text I like to pound out for Respectful Insolence. However, I have to admit that this video sums up the attitude behind a whole lot of woo that I like to apply a skeptical deconstruction to--with music!
Posted by Orac at 10:15 AM • 9 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
October 3, 2008
Category: Alternative medicine • Announcements • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
...at The ScienceBlogs Book Club has been posted. Go forth and enjoy. As always for these Book Club Posts, no comments are allowed here. Got a response? Hate my guts? Think I'm in the pocket of Big Pharma, Big Government, and the Illuminati, too? At least for this post, say it over there!
Posted by Orac at 1:45 PM • • View blog reactions
Category: Clinical trials • Medicine
You can tell I'm really busy when I fall behind my reading of the scientific literature to the point where I miss an article highly relevant to topics I'm interested in, be they my laboratory research, clinical interests, or just general interests, such as translational research. As you know, I like to think of myself as a translational researcher. Translational research is research that (or so we try to do) spans both basic science and clinical science; i.e., bridges the gap between basic and clinical science. Now don't get me wrong; I don't devalue basic science, and I've said so many times before. Without a robust pipeline of basic science developments to try to translate, translational research grinds to a halt. On the other hand, the NIH emphasizes translational research these days. In any grant, if the applicant can't articulate a reasonable (or at least reasonable-sounding) rationale by which the results could lead to a treatment or greater understanding of disease that could lead to a treatment, that grant's chances of being funded drop like a rock.
Even though I believe translational research is extremely important, sometimes I think that it's a bit oversold. For one thing, it's not easy, and it's not always obvious what basic science findings can be translated. For another thing, it takes a long time. The problem is that the hype about how much we as a nation invest in translational research leads to an expectation that is not unreasonable that there will be a return on that investment. Such an expectation is often not realized, at least not as fast and frequent as we would like, and the reason has little to do with the quality of the science being funded. It has arguably more to do with how long it takes for a basic science observation to follow the long and winding road to producing a viable therapy. But how long is that long and winding road?
A lot longer than many, even many scientists, realize. At least, that's the case if the latest paper by John Ioannidis in Science is any indication. The article appeared in the Policy Forum in the September 5 issue and is entitled Life Cycle of Translational Research for Medical Interventions. As you may recall, Dr. Ioannidis made a name for himself a couple of years ago by publishing a pair of articles provocatively entitled Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research and Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. I've blogged about both before.
Dr. Ioannidis lays it out right in the first paragraph:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 1 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
October 2, 2008
Category: Politics
Given that über-quackery booster Mike Adams decided to compare "Western medicine" to the subprime mortgage mess, I wondered what the real cause of this financial meltdown was. Leave it to our friends in the right wing blogosphere and media to find the real culprit: The Community Reinvestment Act. That's right...
...it's all the poor people's fault!
Posted by Orac at 2:31 PM • 27 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Politics • Quackery
After having posted about Jenny McCarthy, my brain hurt so much from the neuron-apoptosing idiocy that she always delivers that I decided I needed to move on to something that wouldn't assault my reason and quite so much. So I headed on over to that uber-repository of quackery and paranoid conspiracy theories, Mike Adam's Natural News.
It's true. Jenny is so dumb that Mike Adams looks intelligent by comparison, and that's saying a lot. Well, not really. In actuality, they're both black holes of negative intelligence, sucking all knowledge and science out of whatever environment self they land in. When you're looking at the relative potency of one black hole over another in creating an event horizon of stupid, past which no intelligence unfortunate enough to wander near can escape, differences don't really matter that much. What I'm talking about is an amazing bit of twisted analogy creation by that wizard of woo-ful lies, Mike Adams, entitled Why the Institutions of Western Finance and Western Medicine are Both Doomed to Fail.
Did you know that "Western medicine" is like the U.S. financial system right now? Mike Adams tells us so, listing seven reasons, of which I'll discuss a few:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:32 AM • 24 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
I guess that since my resistance failed, and I couldn't resist posting yesterday about the burning stupid that is Jenny McCarthy and her arrogance of ignorance in claiming that vaccines caused her son's autism and her campaigning to "Green Our Vaccines" (in reality, a smokescreen to hide her antivaccinationism), I thought why not go whole hog and get it out of my system? Let's just take in a concentrated dose, as the more Jenny talks the more she discredits the antivaccine movement among anyone with a lick of scientific literacy:
Jenny's on fire with stupid! She starts right out saying "without a doubt in my mind I believe that vaccinations triggered Evan's autism," and it goes downhill from there, going on about being a "firsthand witness" to Evan's regression. It's all there, including the "evil pharma" gambit, in which she says there is "such a huge business in pharmaceuticals." The piece de resistance?
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 12:00 AM • 28 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
October 1, 2008
Category: Alternative medicine • Announcements • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
...has been posted over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club.
Head on over. As will be the case for all my posts at the Book Club, please leave comments there, not here. Thanks.
Posted by Orac at 3:45 PM • • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Entertainment/culture • Medicine • Movies • Popular culture • Quackery • Television
Readers may be wondering why I haven't written about Jenny McCarthy's latest brain dead outburst against Amanda Peet. (Actually, brain dead is too kind a description of it, given that Jenny's retort in essence boils down to her having an "angry mob" on her side making Amanda "completely wrong.") It's because I decided to try to resist for once in my life. And I was doing really good at it, too, even though several readers sent me links to various stories about Jenny McCarthy's outburst. Still, I resisted. Even after antivaccinationist financier J. B. Handley wrote a post demanding of Amanda Peet, How Much Are They Paying You?, I held back and didn't respond to Handley's obvious use of the Pharma Shill Gambit, complete with a photo of a prostitute sticking money into her stocking. Oddly enough, I didn't notice a post right below it (more on that later).
Then, damn it, I also noticed that P.Z. had to go and set loose his Pharynguloid hordes on the accompanying poll that went with this post. Regular readers know that I've never been that thrilled with P.Z. Myers' penchant for sending his Pharynguloid hordes over to infest dubious Internet polls. It always struck me as a bit childish and bullying. On the other hand, I must reluctantly admit that at times it's pretty hilarious. Lately, I've been coming around somewhat, and I think that perhaps P.Z.'s mistake is not so much that he does unleash the hounds on stupid Internet polls but that he does it too often. In other words, it's become boring and predictable. I also realize that, with about 1/10 (or less) of the traffic that P.Z. garners, if I were to send my Respectfully Insolent mini-horde to crash a poll, the likely result would be embarrassment and ineffectiveness. And, I must admit, his unleashing of his poll crashers on a poll asking who is right about vaccines, Amanda Peet or Jenny McCarthy was pretty funny.
Even so, early this morning after having seen P.Z.'s post, still I resisted blogging about it. After all, what could I do? The last time I checked, the vote was running around 94% to 6% against Jenny McCarthy.
Then, as I was taking a break to eat lunch, I noticed that something really and truly hilarious had happened. (Remember the post I hadn't noticed before?) The antivaccinationists at the Age of Autism tried to rally their troops to challenge the hegemony of the Pharynguloid hordes by exhorting them to go and vote in the poll, too! The flea rose up to challenge the elephant! Truly, comic gold.
You know, for perhaps the first time ever, I actually feel a bit sorry for merry band of antivaccinationists over at AoA. They have no clue whatsoever what they've just provoked, as PZ has sent his ravening hordes directly to AoA.
The horror, the horror. For the antivaccinationists, that is.
Posted by Orac at 12:30 PM • 26 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Announcements • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
Just a quick announcement here:
The ScienceBlogs Book Club is back up and running, and this time the book under discussion is the latest by that Dark Lord of Vaccination himself, that Darth Vader to the antivaccinationist Luke Skywalker, otherwise known as Satan Incarnate to Jenny McCarthy, J.B. Handley, Andrew Wakefield, Dan Olmsted, and the crew of antivaccinationists spreading misinformation and endangering public health and promoting an amazing panoply of quackery to "cure" autism, Dr. Paul Offit. The book under discussion is Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, and it's one I highly recommend. In fact, I'm participating in the Book Club, and my review of the book is scheduled to post automatically this afternoon at the Book Club; so don't miss it. I'll be monitoring the comments there, starting after work today.
In the meantime, to whet your appetite and kick the discussion off, Dr. Offit himself has posted an introduction to the Book Club discussing his book. Over the next ten days, we hope to stimulate lots of discussion of the book, and 50 readers have received a free copy to review and discuss. Starting tomorrow or Friday and continuing until October 10, I will be periodically posting to the Book Club blog, as will Dr. Offit himself; Kristina Chew, PhD, author of the blog Autism Vox; Kev Leitch, founder of the blog Left Brain, Right Brain and currently one of its major bloggers; Bob Park, PhD, a University of Maryland physics professor and author of the weekly online column, What's New by Bob Park; and yours truly, that cranky, arrogant, Plexiglass box of multicolored blinking lights with a bad attitude and a penchant for deconstructing the B.S. that antivaccinationists regularly lay down. I'll also be sure to post an announcement right here every time I post to the Book Club and include a link to the relevant post.
Finally, comments to this post (and all posts pointing to the Book Club) will be closed. I'n doing this not because I don't want discussion (I most certainly do), but because for the next ten days I want discussions relevant to Dr. Offit's book to occur at The ScienceBlogs Book Club, not here.
Ready? Head on over! Maybe we can get David Kirby or Dan Olmsted to show up. They've both got a lot of explaining to do.
Posted by Orac at 10:30 AM • • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Clinical trials • Medicine • Quackery
When I first started blogging, I liked to refer to myself as a booster of evidence-based medicine (EBM). These days, I'm not nearly as likely to refer to myself this way. It's not because I've become a woo-meister of course. Even a cursory reading of this blog would show that that is most definitely not the case.
So what's changed? Basically, I've come to the realization that EBM is an imperfect tool. Don't get me wrong, EBM goes a long way towards systematizing how we approach clinical data, but there's one huge flaw in it. (I can just see a quack somewhere quote-mining that sentence: "Orac says EBM has a huge flaw!") That flaw is that it devalues basic science. In any hierarchy of evidence in the commonly used EBM systems, at the very top is, as they should be, are randomized, double-blind studies. Such studies control for the most potentially confounding variables and tries to rigorously isolate the difference between experimental groups to just the study drug or treatment. Thus, level 1a evidence is evidence from multiple randomized controlled trials with homogeneity of the trials. From there, the strength of studies falls by study type all the way down to the least powerful forms of evidence, such as case series. At the very bottom is the following:
Expert opinion without explicit critical appraisal, or based on physiology, bench research or "first principles"
In other words, EBM devalues basic science.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 56 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
September 30, 2008
Category: Medicine • Politics
After all the recent blogging about John McCain's health and whether his melanoma will recur or his left ptosis is anything other than from benign causes, probably relating to aging, you just know I couldn't pass this story up:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- If John McCain is elected and goes on to win a second term, there's as much as a one-in-four chance America could see its first woman president -- Sarah Palin.
It's actuarial math.
The odds highly favor either McCain or Barack Obama completing a first term in good health. After that, McCain's odds still are still fairly solid, but his chances of dying or being in poor health go up faster than Obama's, mainly because of his age.
The personalized actuarial study shows:
An Atlanta actuarial company specializing in individualized estimates of life and health expectancy has run the numbers for McCain, 72, and Obama, 47. The firm, Bragg Associates, calculated the odds of the candidates dying in office, adjusted for their known health problems.
McCain would be the oldest president to begin a first term in office. By the end of a second term, Jan. 20, 2017, he would have a 24.44 percent chance of dying, compared with 5.76 percent for Obama, the firm estimates.
The "health expectancy" (i.e., the number of years left of good health that can be expected) was also calculated for both candidates:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 3:36 PM • 36 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
Yesterday's post was a result of the feeling that I had been getting too snarky for too long a time without doing some serious science or medical blogging. Not that there's anything wrong with being snarky, but a continuous diet of snark eventually gets dull--and not just to readers. However, science blogging is hard. Posts like that take a lot of work (which is why I have a propensity to write such posts over the weekend and post them on Monday). After I do a serious, thoughtful post like that, sometimes I just need a diversion. Sometimes I need to examine something that allows me to deliver a bit of the ol' not-so-Respectful Insolence to a highly deserving target. It's very cathartic, not to mention entertaining.
Thank heaven for PETA. The merry band of animal rights nutcases in that organization never fail to disappoint. Last week, it was their writing an open letter to Ben & Jerry suggesting that they replace the cow's milk with breast milk in the making of their famous ice creams. Truly, you can't make stuff like this up. I wondered what PETA might do to top that. Unfortunately, I didn't have long to wait. Witness the latest PETA ad campaign in the form of a billboard in Newark, NJ:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 8:55 AM • 60 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
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 
