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David Gorski

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski. That Orac has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 30 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: oracknows@gmail.com

Posts by this author

July 16, 2006
Although Capitalist Pig vs. Socialist Swine found it to be possibly the funniest video on the Internet, I found it very disturbing that people (in this case, the infamously homophobic and hate-filled Westboro Baptist Church) can actually think this way and seriously believe the statements in this…
July 16, 2006
Pediatric Grand Rounds, vol. 1, no. 7 has been posted at Pediatricsinfo.com. Check it out.
July 16, 2006
Four words: David Hasselhoff music video. Oh, the pain, the pain. Of course, even Hassel the Hoff may not be able to "top" this YouTube video from hell:
July 15, 2006
After last week's reemergence of the Hitler Zombie from his underground crypt to snack on the brains of a couple of political consultants in my home city of Detroit, my sister kindly sent me this link, which explains a bit more of the background. It turns out that the HItler Zombie may be cleverer…
July 15, 2006
Last weekend, I posted a YouTube video of William Shatner singing Elton John's Rocket Man in his--shall we say?--unique fashion. A fellow ScienceBlogger commented and asked if there was a video of Shatner singing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I'm not sure that this quite qualifies as what he had…
July 14, 2006
From The Daily Mail: British holidaymakers are putting their lives at risk by relying on homeopathy to protect them against malaria, doctors have warned. The medical experts condemned the practice of prescribing pills and potions made from tree bark, swamp water and rotting plants as 'outrageous…
July 14, 2006
As hard as it is to believe, we're up to the third week of Your Friday Dose of Woo. And, at week 3, I'm still having the same problem: too many targets of woo, so many so that they overwhelmed my tired brain not unlike Lionel Milgrom's quantum homeopathy becoming quantumly entangled with my neurons…
July 13, 2006
Sid Schwab has started blogging at Surgeonsblog. One of his early posts is about a particularly difficult breast cancer patient that he had to deal with. He even shares my pet peeve about mammographers: The radiologist who read my patient's current xray reported that there was a cluster of…
July 13, 2006
Over the couple of days or so, a minor flurry of comments have hit the ol' blog. I hate to let commenters dictate the content of my blog, but it's strictly a coincidence that this happens to be a post I had been planning sometime this week anyway and it comes around the same time as the minor altie…
July 12, 2006
The latest edition of Change of Shift, a blog carnival for nursing, has been posted at Emergiblog. Check it out.
July 12, 2006
You've probably heard of them, those concierge programs credit card companies offer that claim to be able to get you reservations at popular restaurants. You've probably wondered if they were any good or could do what is claimed. The Waiter gives the real story about how useful those cards are for…
July 12, 2006
Like most bloggers, I suspect, I like to know who's linking to me. Unfortunately, the majority of bloggers appear not to use TrackBacks, and even when they do for some reason the TrackBacks often don't register. Couple that with a level of comment spam that sometimes outnumbered my legitimate…
July 11, 2006
Sitting in a corner office, Adolph Mongo perused daily reports. It was early evening and nearly everyone in the office had gone home, leaving only a few die-hards left to finish up. A crack political operative who runs a political and media consulting firm active in Michigan and Detroit politics,…
July 10, 2006
Ever wonder how certain fundamentalists can believe without question every word in an ancient text as being absolutely literal, even to the point of accepting a myth of a seven day creation over all the scientific evidence that has accumulated over the decades that the earth is really billions of…
July 10, 2006
As others have complained, a new and overzealous spam filter caused a number of us ScienceBloggers headaches while trying to post over the weekend and has caused problems in commenting as well. I've been informed that a fix has been done. We've been asked to do a post; so I figured I'd really test…
July 10, 2006
I had tried to give the Dr. Mark Geier and his son David a rest for a while, as I suspected my readers may have been getting a little tired of my bashing them, no matter how deserved that bashing may have been. After all, they do shoddy science in the service of "proving" that mercury in vaccines…
July 9, 2006
It's come to my attention that new spam filters placed on Friday have caused problems on some blogs with commenting. They apparently have also caused problems posting, because the post I was working on last night kept producing errors when I tried to save it. The process of trial and error led me…
July 9, 2006
He had been away a while. In fact, he had been away so long (since early May) that I was starting to wonder if he had given up blogging, which would have been a blow, given that he's one of my favorite skeptical bloggers. Fortunately, my fears were premature, and he's back, with part 2 of his Seven…
July 9, 2006
Well here's an interesting tidbit. Check out this campaign ad for John F. Kennedy from 1960: It kind of puts the whole English-only issue into new perspective, doesn't it? Here's a video of Jackie Kennedy, "pandering" to the Hispanic vote" for her husband 46 years ago! Did the Kennedy campaign's…
July 8, 2006
No further explanation needed about this clip from 1978. Bow down and worship at the feet of the Shat! He even forms his own trinity!
July 8, 2006
Not surprisingly, it comes from Ann Coulter: Throw in enough words like imagine, perhaps, and might have -- and you've got yourself a scientific theory! How about this: Imagine a giant raccoon passed gas and perhaps the resulting gas might have created the vast variety of life we see on Earth. And…
July 8, 2006
Segway polo, anyone? Is it possible for a sport to move any slower?
July 7, 2006
When I originally conceived of doing a weekly feature entitled "Your Friday Dose of Woo," I did it almost on a whim. Now that I've reached the second week, I've realized that this is going to be harder than I thought. No, it's not that it's hard to find suitable targets. Quite the opposite, in fact…
July 7, 2006
On Wednesday, in response to really bad analogy attacking the NAACP and the Black and Hispanic Congressional Caucuses, I wrote a rather lengthy post that attempted to educate the rather clueless blogger by the name of LaShawn Barber who had produced the rant about how the white nationalist teen…
July 6, 2006
Fellow ScienceBlogger Janet Stemwedel, in reference to the declining NIH budget, asks: Hey, where'd that gravy train go? She makes a number of good points and the article she references discusses Case Western Reserve University, where I spent eight years doing residency and graduate school. I may…
July 6, 2006
It's that time again, time for the 38th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. Thirsty? Well, LBBP over at Skeptic Rant offers parched skeptics a fine assortment of beverages including Satire Cider, Quack Quencher, Woo Brew, and Creationist Tonic, among others. It's just the cool, refreshing dose of…
July 6, 2006
The mercury militia and MMR scaremongers aren't going to like this, not one bit. What should greet my in box upon my arrival at work after a long Fourth of July weekend, but an alert of a new study of a large population of children in Canada that utterly failed to find an epidemiological link…
July 5, 2006
This week's issue of Nature features a list of the top five science blogs, based on Technorati rankings for number of incoming links, narrowly defining its science blogs as blogs written by working scientists. Not surprisingly, a ScienceBlogs blog Pharyngula came out on top at number one, followed…
July 5, 2006
Almost as if by design, after my post earlier today about LaShawn Barber's really bad analogy comparing the white nationalist teenage singing duo Prussian Blue's invocation of "white pride" to minority groups like the NAACP, I came across this post over on David Neiwert's blog showing what real…
July 5, 2006
PZ may have wasted his life preparing students for medical school, and Skeptico may have wished that he had thought of this first, but what about me, a real physician, who, if EoR is correct, has utterly wasted his life actually going to medical school? Read this excerpt from EoR's Words to a…