Medicine
oracknows | July 24, 2015The conspiracy deepens.
What conspiracy? You ask. Haven't you heard? Big pharma is out killing alternative medicine doctors! Or at least that's what you'll be told if you venture towards the deep dark underbelly of quack websites. Up until now, the most prominent "victim" was autism quack, Jeff Bradstreet, who, according to police, committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest in the woods of North Carolina but who, according to antivaccine advocates and "autism biomed" quacks, must have been assassinated by a big pharma black ops team. Or something. After all, as we know, the FDA had…
oracknows | July 23, 2015Back when I started this blog, I hadn't yet become aware of the phenomenon known as quackademic medicine. This phenomenon, as you recall, is the infiltration of academic medical institutions that should be bastions of science- and evidence-based medicine by outright quackery. In quackademic medicine, we see Very Respectable Academic Physicians and Scientists wasting their time studying faith healing like healing touch and reiki, prescientific medicine based on primitive vitalism such as traditional Chinese medicine and (of course) acupuncture, and even sympathetic magic like homeopathy. It's…
oracknows | July 22, 2015My topic yesterday was When doctors betray their profession. In my post, I talked about some very unethical doctors representing tobacco companies in lawsuits against them seeking compensation for death and injury due to smoking, as well as to doctors and scientists peddling pseudoscience and quackery representing claimants in the Autism Omnibus action several years ago, in essence supporting the scientifically unsupported idea that vaccines cause autism. The reason I brought this up was to show doctors behaving badly in "conventional" and not-so-conventional medical-legal situations.…
oracknows | July 19, 2015Mammography is a topic that, as a breast surgeon, I can't get away from. It's a useful tool that those of us who treat breast cancer patients have used for over 30 years to detect breast cancer in asymptomatic women and thus (or so we hope) decrease their risk of dying of breast cancer through early intervention. We have always known, however, that mammography is an imperfect tool. Oddly enough, its imperfections come from two different directions. On the one hand, in women with dense breasts its sensitivity can be maddeningly low, leading it to miss breast cancers camouflaged by the…
oracknows | July 13, 2015I sometimes catch flak for repeating this, but there was a time when I thought there might be something to acupuncture. I don't care, because, as a blogger, when I write a post I assume that a significant fraction of people reading it have never seen this blog before and therefore aren't even the least bit familiar with what I've written before on the subject. That makes them a blank slate, as far as this blog is concerned, and obliges me to explain everything. That time was about nine or ten years ago, and my rationale was, not surprisingly, that, unlike many other alternative medicine…
oracknows | July 10, 2015Naturopathy is a cornucopia of quackery with a patina of plausibility applied in the form of some seemingly reasonable recommendations about diet and exercise. Under the patina, however, lies virtually every form of quackery known to humankind. Be it homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, applied kinesiology, iridology, bogus diagnostic testing, reflexology, craniosacral therapy, or even organ repositioning (nonsurgical, I hasten to point out), no form of pseudoscientific medicine is rejected by naturopaths based on science. This is not surprising, given that naturopathy is based on…
oracknows | July 9, 2015As much as I write about the foibles, pseudoscience, and misadventures of cranks and quacks that endanger patients. However, never let it be said that I don't also pay attention to the foibles and misadventures of real doctors that endanger patients. Sometimes that occurs due to incompetence. Sometimes it's due to the persistent use of invasive modalities that have been shown not to work far longer than they should have been abandoned (e.g., vertebroplasty). Sometimes it's poor judgment. Of course, because I'm a surgeon, I tend to gravitate towards discussions of surgery when I leave my usual…
oracknows | July 2, 2015Dammit.
I had planned on posting something else tomorrow that, because it had been posted elsewhere, would be minimal work. The reason, of course, is because it's the 4th of July weekend and today is a federal holiday. Unfortunately, sometimes things happen that I cannot ignore, even though all sorts of other bloggers are writing about the same thing, because, well, it's something that goes to the very core of what this blog stands for. As you know, one of the most frequently addressed topics (certainly in the top three, if not number one) is the antivaccine movement, its pseudoscience, and…
oracknows | July 2, 2015Sometimes, I think advocates of "integrative" medicine are trolling me. Of course, unlike antivaccine advocates, I realize it (usually) isn't about me at all and they're just writing what they believe and have (usually in the vast majority of cases) never encountered me and (usually in the vast majority of cases) aren't considering me at all. Even so, it's hard, when coming across an article like The Power of Integrative Medicine When All Else Fails by Emma M. Seppälä over on Psychology Today, not to think that I'm being trolled, so blatant are the alternative medicine propaganda and apologia…
oracknows | June 29, 2015The overarching goal that proponents of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as is becoming the preferred term, "integrative" medicine is the mainstreaming of the "unconventional" treatments that fall under the rubric of these two terms. Indeed, that's the very reason why they so insisted on the shift from calling it CAM to calling it "integrative medicine." Not being content with the subsidiary status as not quite "real" medicine" that the words "complementary" and "alternative" imply, they want their woo to be seen as full co-equals with scientific medicine, hence…
cmonforton | June 25, 2015The American Public Health Association (APHA) takes the prize for the best headline in response to today’s Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act (ACA): "Six million sighs of relief."
APHA’s executive director Georges Benjamin, MD elaborated:
“We are pleased the court understood the legislative history and intent of this law… We know that when people can’t afford health insurance, they don’t get health care — and get sicker as a result. …APHA and the public health community rejoice in today’s decision, and look forward to working with the administration and Congress to realize…
oracknows | June 25, 2015About a year and a half ago, I began an intermittent series that I called How "They" View "Us." There are several posts in the series now. Basically, given the amount of nastiness directed at those of us who refute pseudoscience, in particular quackery and antivaccine pseudoscience, by those who believe in it, I tried to envision, quite literally, how "they" view "us." I even did a talk on the topic at the Science-Based Medicine workshop at The Amazing Meeting last year. Basically, I pointed out that we might think of ourselves on the side of right (and, let's face it, we are), the believers…
lborkowski | June 24, 2015Innovation in healthcare doesn't just mean new drugs and devices; sometimes, studying and updating procedures can result in big improvements for patients' health. In the New York Times, Gina Kolata reports on procedure changes hospitals have made to improve care for heart-attack patients:
With no new medical discoveries, no new technologies, no payment incentives — and little public notice — hospitals in recent years have slashed the time it takes to clear a blockage in a patient’s arteries and get blood flowing again to the heart.
The changes have been driven by a detailed analysis of the…
oracknows | June 24, 2015My opinion about medical marijuana has been fairly consistent. First, the claims made by its advocates for it far exceed the evidence for its benefit, which is why I've referred to it as the "new herbalism." Of course, it's not really very new, but it is herbalism in that medical marijuana advocates make grandiose claims for using their favorite "drug" in its plant form rather than doing the standard thing that modern medicine does with natural products and try to isolate the active compounds, in this case a class of molecules known as cannabinoids. Second, although medical marijuana might…
oracknows | June 19, 2015Even if you're a relative newbie to this blog, you probably wouldn't be particularly surprised to learn that I don't much like Dr. Mehmet Oz, a.k.a. "America's Doctor." Of course, I refer to him as something slightly different, namely "America's Quack," for a whole host of reasons, including his featuring psychic mediums like John Edward and Theresa Caputo, faith healers, Ayurveda, homeopaths, dubious dietary supplements, and even antivaccine loons like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Indeed, when about a year ago Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) hauled him in front of her Senate committee over his…
lborkowski | June 4, 2015Fifty years ago, on June 7, 1965, the Supreme Court issued the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which struck down a Connecticut law that criminalized the encouragement or use of contraception. Estelle Griswold, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, the organization’s medical director, had been arrested and fined $100 each for providing contraceptive advice to married persons. In a 7-2 decision, the Court ruled in their favor, finding that Connecticut’s law prohibiting contraception violated the right to marital privacy. In 1972, in…
oracknows | June 3, 2015As depressing as the litany of quackery and patient harm that I follow nearly every day can become, occasionally I am heartened to learn of a victory for science-based medicine and, more importantly, for the patients being victimized by pseudoscientific treatments. One of the most simultaneously ridiculous and vile of these treatments is a solution known as the "Miracle Mineral Solution" or "Miracle Mineral Supplement" (MMS). MMS is the "discovery" of a man named Jim Humble who, for reasons only understood by antivaccinationists, HIV/AIDS denialists, quacks, and cranks, decided that ingesting…
oracknows | June 1, 2015I've been following Mike Adams a long time, going back to 2007 and even before. It's difficult to find anyone who can pack more pseudoscience, conspiracy mongering, and outright hateful bile into an article when he has a mind to do so. I've documented this tendency many times, so many times that, each time I write about one of his rants, I tell myself it'll be the last time. But it never is, because Adams is so vile and I cannot abide the way he spits on the grave of people who died of cancer, people like Tony Snow, Patrick Swayze, Elizabeth Edwards, and Farrah Fawcett. Every time, his MO is…
oracknows | May 22, 2015Antivaccine activism endangers children. Of that there is no longer any doubt. As vaccination rates fall, the risk of outbreaks of dangerous vaccine-preventable infectious diseases among children rise. In the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak earlier this year, several states introduced measures to restrict nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine requirements. The record in passing such measures has been mixed, at best, but California went one better in an act that was completely unexpected to me. Basically Senator Richard Pan, who also happens to be a pediatrician, introduced SB 277, a…
oracknows | May 15, 2015Dedicated to lilady.
One of the disadvantages of writing for this blog is that sometimes I feel as though I spend so much time deconstructing bad science and pseudoscience in medicine that I'm rarely left with the time or the opportunity to discuss some interesting science. Of course, even when I do that, usually it's in the context of that very same bad science or pseudoscience, and this post won't be different. Still, there was some interesting science with respect to vaccines published last week in Science, and I think it's worth looking over. The only thing that surprises me is that the…