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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

April 1, 2006
R.I.P. Hal. At least you had a good romp before the end.
April 1, 2006
Sadly, unlike my post a couple of hours ago, this is not an April Fools jest. Evolgen previously reported on the success of the Specter-Harkin Amendment in the Senate to change a completely flat National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget containing actual real cuts to the budget of the National…
April 1, 2006
You know, after all these years as a scientist, physician, and skeptic, I've been wondering. Perhaps it's time to undergo a reassessment of my and philosophy. I've always been a bit of a curmudgeon, and it hasn't really gotten me anywhere. My words appear to have no impact on the credulous. For…
March 31, 2006
This is just to announce briefly that comment spam has once again reared its ugly head. Some spam comments are actually making it through the filters to be published here. I delete them as soon as I see them, but I'm dismayed that they're getting through. As a result I may be tightening up the spam…
March 31, 2006
Congrats are in order to fellow blogger Phil Plait (a.k.a. The Bad Astronomer) whose blog Bad Astronomy (a misnomer if ever there was one, given the amount of good astronomy he regularly writes about) garnered a favorable mention in the Netwatch section of Science. Hopefully this will bring Bad…
March 31, 2006
The 2005 Pigasus Awards have been announced by The Amazing Randi himself. The categories: Category #1, to the scientist who said or did the silliest thing related to the supernatural, paranormal or occult. Category #2, to the funding organization that supported the most useless study of a…
March 31, 2006
Maybe you're like me, tired of a government that does not seem to respect one of the founding documents of our nation, namely the Bill of Rights. Maybe you're tired of Christian fundamentalists who do not see the placement of monuments containing the Ten Commandments on government property as a…
March 30, 2006
Why? Because I feel like it. So here goes... It's on America's tortured brow That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow And now the workers have struck for fame 'Cause Lennon's on sale again See the mice in their million hordes From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads Rule Britannia is out of bounds To my…
March 30, 2006
Yes, it's that time again, time for the most dedicated skeptics of the blogosphere to gather once again to try to apply critical thinking in an environment where credulity is usually the order of the day, and dubious stories can proliferate and spread around the world in mere hours. This time, Abel…
March 30, 2006
Earlier this week, I wrote about how the principles of population evolution can be applied to premalignant lesions in order to predict which lesions would progress to cancer. This time around, I'd like to discuss how using evolutionary principles can provide insights to human disease that would not…
March 29, 2006
Another great edition of Tangled Bank has been posted at The Island of Doubt. (It's hard to believe that Tangled Bank has been around now for nearly two years. Time flies.) What are you waiting for?
March 29, 2006
Leave it to The Onion: Alternative-Medicine Practitioner Refuses Alternative Method Of Payment.
March 29, 2006
I don't normally read the Financial Times. "What?" you say. "I thought that all doctors read the FT." Ah, but you forget that I'm an academic physician. Don't get me wrong; I make a comfortable living, more money than I've made in my entire life, but I could almost certainly increase my earnings by…
March 28, 2006
A week ago, I wrote about my wife and my visiting Body Worlds at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Well, it looks as though another physician Dr. Charles has visited it as well and has some ideas comments about the exhibit.
March 28, 2006
It looks like everyone at ScienceBlogs is trying this quiz. Now that I have been completely assimilated into the collective, I cannot resist. So... You Are 22% Evil A bit of evil lurks in your heart, but you hide it well. In some ways, you are the most dangerous kind of evil. How Evil Are You?
March 28, 2006
Duck, everyone! Matt (a.k.a. The Pooflinger) has found a PDF file containing a brand new FAQ about Kansas's new science standards, the ones that purport to "teach the controversy" about evolution. While I'm on a roll about evolution (and, yes, the next installment of my Medicine and Evolution…
March 28, 2006
Via Red State Rabble, I've become aware of an incredibly depressing story about science teachers in Arkansas explicitly censoring themselves when it comes to teaching evolution (the "e-word," as they call it) or in geology class teaching that the earth is 4.5 billion years old: Teachers at his…
March 27, 2006
Heh. More people should do this to Jack Chick tracts. Click the image to see Jack's own tricks turned against him. Here is the original cartoon by Jack Chick.
March 27, 2006
It's that time again. In less than three days, the latest Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle will be posted at Terra Sigillata (who, by the way, wrote an excellent post while I was away at my meeting on why we should continue to study rare cancers). You have until Wednesday evening to submit to him…
March 27, 2006
Last week, I inaugurated a new series on this blog entitled Medicine and Evolution. I even wrote what was to be the second post in the series, a post that (I hoped) would illustrate the utility of applying approaches used to study evolution to human disease. That post is essentially complete, other…
March 26, 2006
My wife would say yes. But, because all the other ScienceBloggers appear to be doing it, I had to take this test to find out: 18.75 % My weblog owns 18.75 % of me.Does your weblog own you? It's actually not as bad as I had feared. It would actually only be 12.5% if I hadn't been forced to answer "…
March 26, 2006
How depressing. Right there on the front page of the New York Times this morning: SACRAMENTO -- Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time…
March 26, 2006
A few days ago, I wrote about Abdul Rahman, an Afghan man who converted to Christianity and was being prosecuted under Islamic Sharia law as an apostate, the penalty for which can be death. Indeed, the prosecutor was seeking the death penalty. It looks like someone finally came to their senses:…
March 26, 2006
I 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…
March 25, 2006
If I were one of the cops facing this guy, I'd be seriously tempted to put my gun aside and say, "You win. Go ahead and leave." At least no one other than the perpetrator was hurt.
March 25, 2006
While 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…
March 24, 2006
Why am I not surprised to learn this? From an AP article: HARRISBURG -- Following recent accounts of threats against other judges, the federal judge in the Dover intelligent design case revealed he, too, was a target of threatening e-mails. U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said a spate of e-…
March 24, 2006
Speaking of Holocaust denial, opening sentence of a review of a new CD by Be Your Own Pet: Aside from the deaf or those in a level of denial up there with David Irving's idiot pronouncements on the Holocaust, everyone's aware that we live in great times for music. Heh. I'm not sure this sort of…
March 24, 2006
One of the most annoying thing about Holocaust "revisionists" is that they really aren't revisionists at all. Revisionism is a legitimate academic pursuit in history. Indeed, nearly all history is to some extent revisionist, because new historians find new sources that previously may have been lost…
March 24, 2006
Here's more proof that there's "one born every minute" and that "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" (yes, I know I'm mixing quote sources): A man named Monte Bowman is selling a product called Photoblocker that is designed to be sprayed on auto license…