Quackery
oracknows | December 27, 2006While 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 blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 24, 2006
I was made aware of a most interesting study today appearing in the journal Cancer, which is the official…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While 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 blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 21, 2006.
I know I'm a bit of a stickler, a curmudgeon, if you will, when it comes to medicine. Call me crazy, but…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While 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 blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on July 20, 2005.
Today in Washington, there will be a march, called (with unintentional irony) the Power of Truth march. Its organizers claim that it will be to "…
oracknows | December 24, 2006This one's too good for me to ignore even on vacation. It's the perfect gift for the skeptical.
Remember the Friday Dose of Woo in which I had a little fun with the whole concept of trepanning (drilling a hole in your head to "improve blood flow")? Well guess what?
The trepanation guy (Randall W. Haws) has shown up right here in the comments of that post. And he thinks that I (and those of you who chimed in) are truly, truly misguided, not to mention hypocrites. He's also pointing out how he is "free" and we're all still "imprisoned."
I can't think of a better blog Christmas present. Well, OK…
oracknows | December 22, 2006Another week in the can.
It's been an eventful one, with prizes won, memories revived, and a couple of pesky Holocaust deniers descending to spew their bile. Hard as it is to believe, the year's almost over and the holidays are upon us. You're probably like me, tired of the Christmas carols, commercials urging you to buy, buy, buy since late October, coupled with the frenzy of preparing for the season. After all that, Christmas is only four days away. Perhaps, like me, you would like to take a little break. And, as always, I know just the thing.
It's time once again for a little bit of tasty…
oracknows | December 20, 2006Dr. Flea's a guy after my own heart. He's been blogging about vaccines, and now he's getting into specific diseases. He's posted an installment about the vaccine against Haemophilus influenza type B:
The first American children to receive the Hib vaccine are turning 20 years old this year.
Flea wasn't practicing medicine in the pre-Hib era, so I asked an older nurse what office-based Pediatrics was like before the vaccine.
"About once a year, a kid would come in with an ear infection. They'd write him a prescription for antibiotics, then he'd go home and die."
Haemophilus influenzae type b (…
oracknows | December 18, 2006I don't think I could have done it much better, if at all.
Dr. R.W. presents, in FAQ-form, a primer on the difference between woo and conventional medicine, even conventional modalities that are weakly grounded in evidence.
A couple of examples:
Many of mainstream medicine's conventional treatments are not evidence based. Aren't they a form of woo?
No. Although some conventional methods fail to measure up to best evidence they are at least based on known anatomy and physiology. They have some plausibility in the observable biophysical model in contrast to the "vital forces", nebulous "energy…
oracknows | December 13, 2006Believe it or not, I missed my own blogiversary.
It's true. It was two days ago. For some reason, as the date approached I got the idea that it was the 13th, when in fact this blog was born on December 11, 2004 on a dreary Saturday afternoon when, after reading the TIME Magazine story about how 2004 was supposedly the "year of the blog" and, given my long history on Usenet pontificating on various topics, on a whim, I decided that I'd dip my toe into this thing called the blogosphere.
Thus was Respectful Insolence⢠born, and I've never looked back since.
Since then, this thing has grown…
oracknows | December 12, 2006Fellow finalist for a 2006 Weblog Award for Best Medical/Health Issues Blog Flea sure stepped into it the other day. A reader e-mailed him a discussion found on the dreaded Mothering.com discussion boards, you know, the same boards that horrified me with the sheer level of antivaccination wingnuttery and HIV/AIDS denialism routinely supported by the discussants there.
After expressing sympathy for a mother's loss of a child, he then goes on to show why it was not, as the mother claimed in the discussion boards, the vaccine that caused her child's death:
What follows is a very sad story of a…
oracknows | December 11, 2006Via The Millenium Project, I've learned that some of the "Dummy" books may be living up to their names a bit too literally:
I almost didn't believe it when I was told that Understanding Autism for Dummies contains advice about how chelation might be a useful treatment for autism, so I used Amazon's "search inside the book" feature and there it was. Perhaps the authors could get a testimonial for the next edition from Abubakar Tariq Nadama. Oh that's right, Abubakar can't give testimonials because he's dead.
Understanding Autism for Dummies, indeed. Peter Bowditch is right. It's all there, if…
oracknows | December 8, 2006Via The Second Sight, I find an example of a tool that, I suspect, many alties will find highly useful: The Woo World Self Treater. It'll allow you to diagnose yourself free from the boot of big pharma and the oppressive evidence-based medicine that close-minded "conventional" doctors like me advocate.
My results are below the fold:
Quantum-consciousness analysis of your auric field shows you are suffering the symptoms of Temporomandibular Joint Disorder, which is commonly seen among males born under the sign of Leo. This may also be due to alien implants. Magnet therapy has been shown to be…
oracknows | November 28, 2006Remind me to mark April 10 down on my calendar. I never realized it was such an important day, and, in any case, I wouldn't want to miss it. Nor should the rest of the skeptical blogosphere. Why? It's World Homeopathy Day, "celebrated" (or, if you're a fan of evidence-based medicine, as I am, lamented) in "honor" of Samuel Hahnemann, the originator of homeopathy, who was born on April 10, 1755.
Oh, joy. (On the other hand, I'm sure I can think of some sort of blog fun to have next April 10.)
Homeopathy, as you may recall, is the "alternative" medical therapy in which, it is postulated, a…
oracknows | November 24, 2006One year ago today, I discovered a rather amusing bit of chicanery on the part of an old "friend," namely J. B. Handley, the proprietor of and driving force behind Generation Rescue, the group that claims that all autism (not just some, not just some, but all) is a "misdiagnosis" for mercury poisoning. Given that today is one year later to the day, I thought it would be amusing to repost this. And, yes, one year later to the day, the domain oracknows.com still redirects to Generation Rescue, although, shamed, J. B. did stop having the domain autismdiva.com redirect to GR.
INTERNET SQUATTER: J…
oracknows | November 24, 2006For the holidays, I thought I'd include a brief little bit of woo that seems not quite extensive enough for a full treatment in Your Friday Dose of Woo but is nonetheless a tasty woo morsel for your edification that fits in with the usual Thanksgiving theme of overindulgence in various foods and the deleterious effect such overindulgence can have on one's waistline. Here's one that I've never heard of before, namely ear stapling for weight loss:
Marie Fallaw says she lost 83 pounds in six months simply by "stapling" her ears.
The Mississippi entrepreneur, owner of Staple Lean LLC, has…
oracknows | November 22, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger Alex Palazzo has discovered autism quackery.
I'm hurt.
I'm hurt because apparently Alex doesn't read my blog. (Just kidding; I don't read every ScienceBlog, either, although I do read many of them and peruse the Last 24 Hours Feed regularly for topics of interest.) If he did, he'd know that simply giving useless RNA from yeast in supplements (it's useless because, as Alex points out in detail, RNA is highly unstable and broken down quickly in the stomach to its component ribonucleic acids) is actually one of the more benign forms of autism quackery. At least it probably…
oracknows | November 18, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger (I'm not all that enamored of the term "SciBling") Abel Pharmboy has finally weighed in on the issue of alternative medicine woo finding its way into medical school curricula and its promotion by the American Medical Student Association, which Dr. RW, Joseph, and I have been discussing the last few days.
Besides using his experience in natural products medicine to discuss this issue, Abel asks a very pointed question from a patient's perspective:
So, someone like me who feels a doctor doesn't have time for them might approach any one of the growing number of integrative…
oracknows | November 16, 2006My recent post (coupled with similar posts by Dr. R. W. and Abel Pharmboy) about the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) and its credulous promotion of non-evidence-based alternative medicine while posing as being "skeptical" of big pharma brought this rejoinder from Joseph of Corpus Callosum, in which he took issue with one aspect of my suspicion of the promotion of woo in medical schools by AMSA. I have to strenuously disagree with nearly all of his points. Here's the first, and most easily dismissed:
They [Dr. R.W., Abel, and I] raise some valid points, although I would not be…
oracknows | November 13, 2006If you're a physician, there comes a certain point in your career when you start caring a lot more than you did about the next generations of physicians in the training pipeline. While you're in the middle of training, you are the next generation; besides, you're too worried about just getting through medical school, residency, and Board certification to be all that concerned about those behind you in the pipeline, anyway. Then, when you're early faculty, you're concerned about establishing yourself, getting your career on track, and, if you're in academics, getting promoted. True, physicians…
oracknows | November 10, 2006Let's get one thing straight.
There's just no way on earth that I can imagine topping last week's Your Friday Dose of Woo. I can only be as good as my source material lets me be (well, maybe a bit better), and Toby Alexander and his "DNA Activation" represented such unbelievably potent, bizarre, and concentrated woo that I can't imagine that I'll find its like anytime soon again, much less find something that tops it. Even if I were to find woo more potent than Toby's, it would probably rend the fabric of the space-time continuum. Of course, given his "multidimensional spectra of DNA…
oracknows | November 8, 2006Is there a connection between Scientology and the mercury militia? Kevin Leitch examines the evidence. As he points out, it's not as far-fetched as it might seem at first:
Everybody knows that Scientology has an almost rabid outlook on psychiatry and what they deem psychiatric labels. Its so bad that Xenu-lover John Travolta is allegedly hiding the fact of his son's autism for fear of offending his masters in Scientology.
Scientologists have a natural theoretical affinity with the mercury militia and in particular the DAN! ideology. They are firmly against medication and firmly in favour of '…