Quackery
oracknows | June 1, 2006About six months back, I wrote about Katie Wernecke, a 13-year-old girl diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma last year, whose parents fought with Texas courts to let them take her to Kansas to receive high dose vitamin C therapy rather than the chemotherapy and radiation therapy that she needed to have a chance of beating her cancer. Events have suggested to me that an update is in order. It turns out that Katie is still alive, although it is unclear how she is doing. Her family has apparently taken her to an undisclosed cancer treatment center out of state, where she is getting more altie "…
oracknows | May 31, 2006When I first saw this, I thought that it had to be a joke, but now I'm not so sure. I'm guessing you've all heard of ear candling, which can supposedly cure tinnitus, clean the ear canal of wax buildup, relieve vertigo, cure swimmer's ear, and provide a variety of other supposed health benefits?
Well, an orifice is an orifice, so are you ready for....ButtCandles� (I don't think that I am.)
According to the web page:
ButtCandles⢠are an exciting, and time honored, device for internal cleansing. We encourage you to peruse our site, read the referenced medical literature, and then make an…
oracknows | May 26, 2006This is just too rich.
As you know a few months ago, I commented about a British report that found high levels of mercury and other heavy metals in Chinese herbal medicines sold in the U.K. Some contained as much as 11% mercury by weight! It turns out that a JAMA paper from 2004 did the same thing for Ayurvedic medicines and found some of them also contaminated with mercury and other heavy metals, concluding:
If taken as recommended by the manufacturers, each of these 14 could result in heavy metal intakes above published regulatory standards
Indeed, in the compounds that tested postive for…
oracknows | May 23, 2006It seems a reasonable question to ask, given my propensity for it.
Unfortunately that's not what our Seed overlords asked this week. This week, they ask:
If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?
Predictably, some ScienceBloggers answered: evolution and what it really means, not the parody of evolution presented by creationists or the simplistic version of it that is often taught in school or discussed in the mainstream media. I can't argue with that answer, but I'm a physician; so my answer will be different:
If I could get the public to…
oracknows | May 23, 2006Grant crunch time again yesterday. That means it's the perfect time once again to dig up something from the archives of old blog and repost it here. This particular piece originally appeared on January 12, 2005, just shy of one month after I started blogging. I'm guessing once again that, because not many people were reading back then, most of you probably haven't seen this before, and that those of you who have probably don't remember it. Once again, I'd be interested in feedback from those who haven't seen this before now that my readership around 10-20 times what it was back then. The only…
oracknows | May 15, 2006NOTE: I had been thinking about how to migrate my old posts from the old blog over to ScienceBlogs, and came up with an idea. Whenever "real life" intrudes on my blogging--as it has now, thanks to two different grant applications that ate up my entire weekend that prevented me from coming up with the more involved piece about science or pseudoscience analysis that I usually like to start the week off with--I'll repost one or more of my favorite "classic posts" from the old blog. Given that there is well over a year of material there, there's lots of stuff that I want to transfer over to…
oracknows | May 3, 2006Last week, I wrote a rather lengthy (or, as my detractors would probably call it, "long-winded") post about the concept of a medical wikipedia. As you may recall, I expressed considerable skepticism about whether the wikipedia concept could work as well as its boosters claim it could. Even though others have clarified what a medical wikipedia could and could not do, I still can't help but worry that activists and alties would hijack the wiki for their own purposes.
Now I've found an actual example to consider, although it's not quite what I warned about.
It turns out that there is an AIDS…
oracknows | April 18, 2006A few days ago, I fisked the antivaccination posturings of a certain "Libertarian Christian commenator" regarding the Geiers' claim that mercury in the thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is a major cause of autism. Many of the comments predicted that Vox wouldn't respond. (Personally, I was hoping that he would but, based on his nonresponse to my earlier fisking of his antivaccination nonsense, figured that he probably wouldn't.)
Guess what? He actually did respond. Although I don't want this to turn into a prolonged blog exchange, I figured that, since Vox went through the bother…
oracknows | April 13, 2006With all the nuttiness coming out of Tom Cruise in the name of Scientology, it's often forgotten that there are a lot of other Scientologists out there in Hollywood. One of the other most prominent ones is John Travolta. Compared to Tom Cruise, John Travolta seems, superficially at least, the height of reason. Certainly he's a lot less obnoxious about his religion than Cruise is, and he always seems like a likable guy whenever he shows up on the talk show circuit. And, heck, anyone who can earn a commercial pilot's license and fly a 707 around the country has to have something upstairs.…
oracknows | April 13, 2006Oh, lovely.
Before I leave the topic of mercury-autism conspiracy mongering for a while, something perverse has led me to feel the need to point out something I've become aware of: Not surprisingly, it looks as though our favorite "Christian Libertarian" commentator from WorldNet Daily, tireless fighter against women's suffrage, and overall antivaccination loon Vox Day has foolishly and credulously falls hook, line, and sinker for the Geiers' claim in their mind-numbingly bad dumpster-diving paper that autism rates have fallen since the removal of thimerosal in vaccines.
Vox, whom I've not…
oracknows | April 12, 2006A while ago, I discussed the case of a chiropracter who has pioneered a technique of "touchless" chiropractic, manipulating patient's spines without even touching them. Well, an Ohio chiropracter has gone one step further. He claims he can cure patients by going back in time:
COLUMBUS, Ohio - A chiropractor who claims he can treat anyone by reaching back in time to when an injury occurred has attracted the attention of state regulators.
The Ohio State Chiropractic Board, in a notice of hearing, has accused James Burda of Athens of being "unable to practice chiropractic according to acceptable…
oracknows | March 26, 2006I don't know how I missed this one yesterday, but a new blogger, Dr. Flea, sarcastically thanks RFK, Jr. for making his practice more difficult
The Thimerosal-Autism story will not die. When I say that a patient asks me about thimerosal every day, I am not exaggerating. Here is today's installment, in the form of an email from a mom:
Part of Dr. Flea's response:
I want to be as clear about this as I can. There is no controversy surrounding Thimerosal. There is scientific evidence and there is hysteria. The scientific evidence suggests that there is no link between thimerosal in vaccines and…
oracknows | March 25, 2006While I work on winging my way back to the East Coast, I thought I'd leave you with a couple of links that I became aware of but didn't get the chance to post.
First up is the older piece by that tireless debunker of dubious medicine and quackery and fellow skeptic, Prometheus. In a piece entitled Mercurial Laboratories, he dissects in detail why the laboratories that purport to show parents that their autistic children have elevated mercury levels almost certainly do not do any such thing. Indeed, what he has written can apply to almost any set of lab tests, particularly this part:
One of…
oracknows | March 19, 2006A couple of weeks ago, I lambasted Mark and David Geier for their irresponsible proposal to treat autism by using Lupron to lower testosterone levels, in essence chemically castrating autistic children, because, they claimed, it would make the mercury that supposedly caused the autism in the first place "easier to excrete."
Naturally, Prometheus couldn't resist piling on too in an article entitled Armchair Science vs. Real Science, which complements my previous analysis by looking at an infamous video the Geiers made, in which they explain the "revelation" that led them to the concept that…
oracknows | March 17, 2006EoR reports that in Australia, legislation has been passed that allows people other than doctors to issue medical certificates for absences from work, including pharmacists, nurses, acupuncturists, and physiotherapists.
Quite naturally, he wonders when the "the reikiists, the homeopathists and the therapeutic touch" practitioners will want the same privileges and imagines the sorts of letters they will produce:
This is to certify that Joe Bloggs is suffering from
Stagnant qi
Liver toxins
Mercury poisoning
He will be unfit for work for two weeks while he strengthens his immune system.
Heh. I…
oracknows | March 14, 2006I'm beginning to fear for Kathleen Seidel.
No, I don't fear for her safety, but I do fear for her sanity. You see, she's spent way too much time delving into the house organ of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), namely The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (with the unfortunate abbreviation JAPS, which is why they probably insist on using JPANDS), formerly known as Medical Sentinel. I've written about JPANDS before, pointing out that its claim of peer review is a sham and that it has an explicitly antivaccine agenda, not to mention its far right wing…
oracknows | March 10, 2006It's good to see the Pooflinger back in action. It really is. I don't even mind that he's starting to muscle in on my territory, because, as he points out, alties need poo-love too. In the process He's unearthed a "gem" of altie wackiness that even I had never encountered before.
Better still, he's returned to deconstructing that tome of creationist nuttiness, The Evolution Cruncher.
oracknows | March 9, 2006Light blogging today, as I'm in the O.R. (Although there will be one more brief post, which, thanks to the wonders of Movable Type's ability to let me schedule a time when posts are published, will be appearing early this afternoon, while I'm still working.The reason why I'm delaying it will, hopefully, be apparent.)
Light blogging or not, I couldn't resist mentioning a post by Kathleen Seidel in which she's picked up on something that I hadn't noticed but wish I had.
In a long, multi-topic "roundup" sort of post, near the end, she mentions RFK Jr.'s essay Tobacco Science and the Thimerosal…
oracknows | March 6, 2006I was going to give this a rest for a while, but this is too good not to post a brief note about.
Posted in the comments of my piece debunking the Geiers' pseudoscience and their laughable "scientific" article claiming to show a decrease in the rate of new cases of autism since late 2002, when thimerosal was removed from vaccines completely other than some flu vaccines was this gem of a comment, by one MarkCC, which stated the essence of what was wrong with the Geiers' so-called "statistical analysis" of the VAERS database:
Here's the key, fundamental issue: when you're doing statistical…
oracknows | March 6, 2006Curse you, Mark and David Geier.
I'm getting tired of having to subject my scientific and critical thinking skills to the assaults on science and reason that you routinely publish in dubious journals to use as weapons in your apparently never-ending crusade to extract as much money as possible out of vaccine manufacturers and the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Dissecting your pseudoscientific claims causes me pain, not so much that I'm driven to take a hiatus from blogging, as Matt was by Kent Hovind's creationism, but almost.
I had hoped to let this cup pass, given how much I've…