It's been a while since I've written about the burgeoning business of selling marijuana as a cure for whatever ails you. As I've written before, there exists a mystical faith that is very much like herbalism that marijuana is a magical plant that can cure, well, almost anything, including cancer, glaucoma, autism, ADHD, and many other conditions, when in fact the evidence is rather shaky for most, if not all, of these claims. Regarding cancer, the usual claim is not that smoking marijuana cures the disease, but rather that cannabis oil isolated from marijuana cures cancer, a claim that Rick…
Yesterday, I wrote about an antivaccine "march on Washington." As is often the case with antivaccine rhetoric, if you listened to the people organizing the conference and planning to speak there, you'd think that they were fighting an apocalyptic battle for the very future of the human race. Certainly, Kent Heckenlively seems to think so. I'm not going to write about this march again, at least not today. It's too soon. I don't know how ridiculous, how pathetic it was, mainly because, as I write this, it hasn't happened yet. What I can write about is something I came across while researching…
About five weeks ago, I took notice of an event that seems to be getting the antivaccine crankosphere a bit riled up and excited. I'm referring to the so-called "Revolution for Truth" march on Washington being organized by various antivaccine groups, who, emboldened by President Donald Trump's long, sordid history of expressing antivaccine views, his meeting with antivaccine agitator Andrew Wakefield in secret in August, and his meeting with antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in January, really believe that now is their moment and that 2017 will be the antivaccine year. Thanks to,…
After yesterday's post on a local news station's credulous promotion of quack acupuncture (but I repeat myself) for pets, I thought I'd stay on the topic of acupuncture for one more day. The reason is that a reader sent me a link to an article in Stars and Stripes that really irritated me, Acupuncture becomes popular as battlefield pain treatment. Longtime readers might remember that I've been writing about the utter ridiculousness and lack of science behind "battlefield acupuncture" and how it makes no sense to be sticking recently wounded soldiers with needles under battlefield conditions.…
Acupuncture is a theatrical placebo, nothing more. It has no "curative powers," and, when studied objectively in good double-blind, randomized controlled clinical trials with proper sham acupuncture controls, there is consistently found to be no difference between sham and "true" (or, as they like to call it, "verum") acupuncture. (Indeed, I have written about this many times.) The only exceptions to this rule tend to be studies that come out of China. Basically pretty much all acupuncture studies that come out of China are positive because they appear to be conducted with the intent to…
Although the requirements vary from state to state, all states require that physicians obtain a certain number of CME credits every licensure period in order to renew their medical licenses. Also, although again the specific requirements vary by specialty board, in order to retain board certification physicians and surgeons must meet certain specific CME credit requirements. Indeed, a particularly annoying new requirement is that a certain number of these credits be "MOC" credits, where MOC stands for "maintenance of certification," a particularly contentious topic among physicians. Basically…
I've written before about how our vaccination rate here in Michigan are...suboptimal. Indeed, a couple of years ago, health officials were so alarmed at the increases in personal belief exemptions to school vaccine mandates that a new regulation was instituted that require parents seeking nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates to travel to an office of the state health department in order to receive instruction about vaccines. They can still get their personal belief exemption, but not without first undergoing instruction. So far, it's been working reasonably well, with decreases…
It was only just yesterday that I recounted the story of a naturopathic quack in Bowling Green, KY who told a cancer patient that "chemo is for losers," promising her that he eliminate her tumor within three months. She listened to him, and as a result she died, as she and her husband were suing the quack. Not long after, her distraught widower walked into the quack's office on a Friday evening earlier this month and, if the police charges are accurate, shot him dead. Basically, because this quack convinced the woman to forego chemotherapy, whatever chance of survival she had was eliminated.…
Naturopathy is a frequent topic on this blog because it is a veritable cornucopia of quackery, in which not pseudoscience is too out there. Homeopathy, functional medicine, bogus diagnostic tests, traditional Chinese medicine, reflexology, naturopaths embrace it all, and more. More importantly, thanks to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), known more recently as "integrative medicine," naturopathy is becoming more and more "respectable." Indeed, there are naturopaths at far too many academic medical centers. One even participated in the writing of the Society for Integrative…
When it comes to the measles, antivaxers love to repeat a series of talking points. One is that measles is not a dangerous disease and was considered a normal part of childhood 50 or 60 years ago. This is what I like to refer to as the "Brady Bunch" gambit, mainly because antivaxers who try to make this argument often invoke an episode of The Brady Bunch from 1969, Is There a Doctor in the House?, in which all six kids contract the measles within a day of each other. Their illness is played for laughs, with the kids shown playing board games and enjoying having a few days off from school,…
[Orac note: A combination of power outages, travel to Seattle, and trying to write something for my not-so-super-secret other blog conspired to leave me with nothing for this morning. So I thought I'd resurrect this old gem, which hasn't been reposted in at least four years. I actually did try to remove the dead links (this post dates back nearly 12 years in some form or another), but I probably missed a couple. I also changed the post a little, just to remove clearly outdated stuff. In the mean time, be assured that, with no more travel planned and our power restored, things should get back…
Among quacks, epigenetics is the new quantum theory.
I know I've said that before, but it's worth saying again in response to a new quack I've just discovered, courtesy of an article in The Daily Mail Fail by one Dr. Sara Gottfried pimping her books and health empire, From taking a sauna to drinking pinot noir, a fascinating book by a hormone doctor reveals how to... switch off your bad genes and live longer.
Epigenetics. She's talking about epigenetics. Of course, she keeps using that word. I do not think it means what she thinks it means. Indeed, if what's in this article is a taste of what…
Some of you might have been wondering just WTF has been going on here on the old blog, given the relative paucity of posts over the last week and the "reruns" from the distant past that I've been posting. I address this question because I realize that not everyone reads the comments and it's quite possible some of you might have missed it, but here in Michigan we had an enormous windstorm last Wednesday that knocked out power to 800,000+ people. Unfortunately, Orac was one of them. True, we did get the power back over the weekend, but then, in a cruel twist of fate, we lot power again on…
It seems hard to believe that the Disneyland measles outbreak occurred more than two years ago. It was during the Christmas holiday of 2014 that an measles outbreak occurred centered at—of course—Disneyland, thanks primarily to unvaccinated children facilitating the spread of the highly contagious disease at the "Happiest Place on Earth." What made this particular outbreak so important, though, was that it provided the impetus Senator Dr. Richard Pan and Senator Ben Allen to introduce a bill (SB 277) into the California legislature for consideration. What made SB 277 unique and its…
[NOTE: Due to the windstorm last week, I was knocked out of the blogging game for a while and even had to stay in a hotel for one night. We did get our power back late Friday night, but we also didn't get Internet back until much later in the weekend, because our cable went out too. So, I thought I'd have a new post for today, but, alas, I did not. So, continuing on the them of Friday, I thought I'd repost an article of a sort that I almost never do any more. This one was posted over 11 years ago and was last reposted over 5 years ago. Tomorrow, I'll definitely be back.]
The patient list for…
[NOTE: As I mentioned yesterday, our power outage continues, and, thanks to having to decamp to a hotel last night, I didn't have time to produce new Insolence. So I thought I'd repost a "classic" from 11 years ago that I don't believe I've ever reposted before during vacation or otherwise. It represents a sort of blogging that I haven't done for years, just a personal story with nothing to do with my usual topics, such as pseudoscience, quackery, clinical trials, and basic science. This story is based on a real patient encounter from around 25 years ago, but details have been changed.]
I don…
In case anyone's interested, the reason that there was no post today is because we had a rather massive windstorm here in the Detroit area that left 800,000 without power. Unfortunately, that number included my wife and me. I valiantly tried to take care of my blogging addiction last night, as the temperature in the house plunged to the 50s. With nothing but residual battery on my laptop and mobile hotspot from my phone I ended up giving up in order to save battery charge, particularly on the phone. Given that the power is still out and I'll be surprised if we get it back before tomorrow or…
I've been writing about a phenomenon that I like to refer to as "quackademic medicine," defined as the infiltration into academic medical centers and medical school of unscientific and pseudoscientific treatment modalities that are unproven or disproven. I didn't coin the term. To the best of my knowledge, Dr. Robert W. Donnell did nine years ago. However, I adopted it with a vengeance, so much so that a lot of people think I coined the term. In any case, I first began sounding the alarm about the infiltration of quackery like acupuncture, "energy medicine," naturopathy, homeopathy,…
Massive is the misinformation promulgated by the antivaccine movement, and many are its lies. For example, antivaxers claim that, in some way or other, vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), cancer, and a wide variety of other conditions and diseases when there is no credible evidence that they do and lots of evidence that they don’t. One of the favorite tropes used by antivaxers to frighten parents out of vaccinating their children is known as the "toxins" gambit, in which antivaxers cite lists of scary-sounding ingredients in vaccines like…
I've been blogging fairly regularly about Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski since 2011, and now the story is over...sort of. Unfortunately, as you will see, the ending is far from ideal. It is, however, somewhat better than I had feared it might be. What I'm referring to, of course, is the final ruling of the Texas Medical Board regarding Dr. Burzynski, the Houston cancer doctor who has been a frequent topic of this blog because of his practices of charging desperate cancer patient tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars for his "antineoplastons" (ANPs) and, later, what he…