"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 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.)
Orac's old Blog is archived at Archived Insolence.
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August 31, 2006
Category: Alternative medicine • Medicine • Politics • Quackery
Boy, oh, boy, I had to control myself on this one. Yes, dear reader, while I was away this last week and a half, many were the times that I wanted to let loose about this. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending...
Posted by Orac at 1:01 PM • 32 Comments
Category: Alternative medicine • Blog carnivals • Medicine • Quackery • Science • Skepticism/critical thinking • Skeptics' Circle
Rapidly dwindling vacation or no vacation, I have to plug the Skeptic's Circle. Some of you may have wondered where the host of this week's Skeptic's Circle has been. After all, a few of you commented that his blog hadn't...
Posted by Orac at 8:55 AM • 0 Comments
Category: Science
While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old...
Posted by Orac at 7:52 AM • 3 Comments
August 30, 2006
Category: Anti-Semitism • History • Holocaust • Holocaust denial
I stared at words on the computer screen, dumbfounded:
They do not want to do it because it would show that at Auschwitz Nazis were conducting ETHICAL medicine and they want to keep the myths of the Holocaust alive!
Posted by Orac at 1:07 PM • 16 Comments
Category: Bioethics • History • Holocaust • Medicine
As longtime readers know, I've had a longstanding interest in the Holocaust. A precursor of the Holocaust was known as the T4 euthanasia program. This was a program in which as many as 200,000 people deemed "useless eaters" or "life unworthy of life" were "euthanized" (a euphemism for "murdered," actually) by a variety of means, including starvation, overdoses of narcotics, poisoning, and early prototypes of gas chambers later used to to such lethal effect. The T4 program, which ran from 1939 to 1941, when Hitler ordered a temporary halt to the program due to protests from churches and the victims' families, provided the development and proving grounds for methods of mass murder that would later be expanded to the industrialized killings of millions from 1941 until the end of the war. Indeed, Josef Mengele himself learned his trade in this program. Of course, even this "temporary halt" was nothing of the sort. The program continued in secret.
Posted by Orac at 8:01 AM • 3 Comments
August 29, 2006
Category: Evolution • Intelligent design/creationism • Pseudoscience • Skepticism/critical thinking
Creationists have the Wedge Document. Now, thanks to The Commissar, one of my favorite conservative bloggers, a man after my own heart who leans right (albeit a bit farther right than I do) but doesn't buy into the fundamentalism of the Christian right that has infested the Republican Party, we now have the Wedgie Document, a guide to arguing with creationists on the Internet.
Posted by Orac at 3:23 PM • 5 Comments
Category: Alternative medicine • History • Holocaust • Holocaust denial • Intelligent design/creationism • Pseudoscience • Skepticism/critical thinking
Most people can get by fine without ever being taught evolutionary biology just as most folks can get by fine without being taught cosmology. So if there's no harm, why should we teach evolution but not creationism or the evidence against evolution?Posted by Orac at 1:16 PM • 2 Comments
Category: Evolution • Intelligent design/creationism • Skepticism/critical thinking
Yet, every so often, a post will provoke a reaction long after I've forgotten I had even written it. So it was last week, when in my e-mail I found a comment about a post I had made over a month earlier. The post in question was a bit of ridicule directed at Frank Peretti, a writer of Christian-themed novels, who had recently written a horror novel whose theme was that "evolution makes us monsters." My beef with Mr. Peretti was the utterly incorrect statements he made while promoting his book, among which was his claim that there are no "beneficial" mutations. Here is what the comment said:
Posted by Orac at 3:41 AM • 6 Comments
Category: Personal • Politics • Science • Skepticism/critical thinking
When I first encountered this post over at Pharyngula a couple of days ago, I wasn't planning on commenting on article to which PZ referred, even though I found it as disturbing as he did, and even though I don't have quite the same compunctions about "beating up on" a student that he does. (Humiliating students and residents for stupid answers is, alas, a longstanding tradition in medical education.) After all, PZ had already taken it on, as had Super Doomed Planet, Jason at Evolutionblog, and The Uncredible Hallq. Whatever I might say today, a couple of days later seemed superfluous. But then I thought about my college days a bit and decided that my take on this, although equally scathing to the attitudes expressed in the article, was nonetheless a bit different. But first, I feel obligated to give you a flavor of why this article was so disturbing. I sincerely hope that this is some sort of satire that misfired, but I fear that it is not.
Posted by Orac at 12:30 AM • 4 Comments
August 28, 2006
Category: Blog carnivals • Skepticism/critical thinking • Skeptics' Circle
Even though I'm on vacation, I would be remiss if I didn't post a reminder to all skeptics and skeptical bloggers out there that the latest edition of the Skeptics' Circle is due to be posted this Thursday. It's being...
Posted by Orac at 3:33 PM • 5 Comments
Category: Cancer • Medicine • Surgery
I thought I wouldn't be continuing this series any more, having more or less mined my thoughts about patient denial of a diagnosis of cancer until (I thought) nothing was left. In my first post on the topic, I described breast cancer patients who presented very late, with huge, bleeding, fungating tumors, yet had somehow managed to hide them from their family, sometimes for years. (Update: Sadly, one of the patients described in this post, unfortunately, has large volume metastatic disease in her bones.)
Posted by Orac at 1:01 PM • 2 Comments
Category: Cancer • Medicine • Surgery
I've been thinking about denial yet again. As regular readers of this weblog know, I've had more than my share of experience dealing with patient denial, as I've described. I've also had enough experiences with denial to realize when it's not denial. A while ago, I dealt with a patient that demonstrates yet another permutation of denial. As always, to protect patient privacy no names are given and some of the details have been altered without changing the heart of the story.
Posted by Orac at 6:14 AM • 3 Comments
August 27, 2006
Category: Evolution • Humor • Intelligent design/creationism • Pseudoscience • Science • Skepticism/critical thinking
While idly perusing my Sitemeter referral log over the weekend, I noticed a spike in traffic directed here from one site. Curious, I read the piece that had mentioned me and saw that I had managed to get an "intelligent design" (ID) apologist named Susanna rather annoyed with my deconstruction of Scrappleface's so-called "satire" about the debate over the teaching of ID in Kansas. I debated whether it was worth the bother to respond to the "rebuttals" and ad hominems in her post, and, after three days, my snark factor won out, as it did a couple of months ago for an altie troll calling himself the Herbinator.
Posted by Orac at 12:53 PM • 3 Comments
Category: EneMan • Humor • Medicine
I was sitting in my office, working on a yearly summary report for a grant. In such reports, it is customary to report on what you have done the previous year and, most importantly, to paint a glowing picture to the granting agency (in this case, the Army) of how much fantastic progress has been made on the funded project and how well-spent its money had been, so that they continue to fund the remaining years of the project. While I was typing away and cutting and pasting various figures into the document, I felt the call of nature. It's not surprising, given that the verbiage that I was introducing into the report was not unlike one of the end products of answering said call (which is probably why such tasks seem to stimulate certain biological functions in me).
Posted by Orac at 8:46 AM • 0 Comments
Category: Humor • Miscellaneous • Personal • Sports
Ah, Chicago! My favorite city, to which I hope to return to reside again someday. Why is it, then, that odd things seem to happen whenever I return for a visit? I hadn't intended on posting today, but I can't seem to avoid having things happen to me on vacation that cause me to break my vow to try not to blog much on vacation. (And there's still nearly a week to go before I go back to work.) So it was on my weekend sojourn to my favorite city to visit old haunts (examples include Club Lucky for great Italian food, Silver Cloud as just a great general neighborhood pub, and John Barleycorn, the inspiration for the pub in which the Skeptics' Circle met twice), hang out, visit my sister and cousin, and in general just chill out.
Posted by Orac at 12:01 AM • 2 Comments
August 26, 2006
Category: Anti-Semitism • Evolution • History • Holocaust • Intelligent design/creationism • Pseudoscience • Skepticism/critical thinking
The other day, in the wake of D. James Kennedy's dishonest documentary Darwin's Deadly Legacy, which blatantly tried to blame the Holocaust and Nazi racial hygiene policies to Darwin's theory of evolution in a totally dishonest way. Particularly ridiculous was...
Posted by Orac at 1:46 PM • 1 Comments
