Medicine
oracknows | June 26, 2012Remember Luc Montagnier? Sure, you do. He's the Nobel Laureate whose identification of the virus that causes AIDS garnered him plaudits, laurels, and, of course, the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Unfortunately, since winning the Nobel Prize, from a scientific standpoint, Montagnier's been on a downward spiral. Sadly, it didn't take long after his Nobel acceptance speech for disturbing signs of crankery and quackery to appear. For instance, Montagnier published a paper that implied that DNA could teleport, using this study, whose results were almost certainly the result of contaminants in…
tsmith | June 22, 2012This is the fourteenth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Caroline Rauschendorfer.
Cryptosporidiosis, known more commonly as crypto, is a gastrointestinal (GI) disease caused by parasites of the Cryptosporidium genus. If infected with crypto you may experience diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, fever, and abdominal cramps that can last up to two weeks. Definitely something you want to avoid, if possible, but at least it usually resolves on its own without medical intervention and is rarely fatal in otherwise healthy individuals. [3]
The most common disease causing organisms for crypto are C.…
oracknows | June 21, 2012
The clip above says it all with respect to "miracle mineral solution" (a.k.a. MMS). Just when I thought I was out...they pull me back in. And, as Yoda would probably put it, back in I am one more time. (How's that for mixing movie allusions?)
Let's recap. MMS is bleach. Specifically, it is a 28% sodium chlorite in distilled water that generates chlorine dioxide when diluted with citric acid-containing or other acid-containing foods, as instructed. This is a chemical used for water purification that a quack—yes, quack—named Jim Humble has touted as a miracle cure for just about everything…
oracknows | June 19, 2012A couple of months ago, a reader sent me an article that really disturbed me. In fact, I had originally been planning to write about it not long after I received it. However, as I've mentioned before, when it comes to blogging, I'm a bit like Dug the Talking Dog from the movie Up in that I'm easily distracted. Unlike Dug, what distracts me aren't squirrels, but rather bright, shiney pieces of pseudoscience, quackery, paranormal, or otherwise weird nonsense. Sometimes after I'm distracted I come back to the topic I had originally wanted to blog about. Sometimes I don't. Or, sometimes (like…
oracknows | June 17, 2012Here we go again.
Remember how last week I said I wouldn't write about the Miracle Mineral Solution (abbreviated MMS) again for a while? I lied.
Well, actually, I didn't. At the time I wrote that, I really did mean to give it a rest for a while, and for a while at least I was a good boy. I even managed to ignore Todd Drezner's excellent post on—of all places!—what is normally a wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, entitled The Curious Case of Autism and MMS. Then came this post by an MMS apologist that we've met before, a man named Adam Mr. Abraham who goes by the handle…
oracknows | June 15, 2012Naturopathy is at least 99% woo. That has to be said at the outset. Naturopaths might brag about all the science they take in naturopathy school, claiming that it's as much as MDs take. Even if that were true, the question is not how many hours of basic science naturopaths take, but rather what's taught in those hours and, more importantly, what's taught in the clinical hours. For instance, given that you can't have naturopathy without homeopathy, it implies that what's taught in basic science classes in naturopathy school allows room for the incredible magical quackery that is homeopathy to…
oracknows | June 12, 2012If there's one thing shared in common among nearly all advocates of pseudoscience, it is the belief that they know The Truth. More importantly, they know The Truth, and The Powers That Be don't want you to know The Truth and will do almost anything to makes sure that The Truth stays secret. Think about it. This sort of thinking is common, be it among advocates of alternative medicine, cold fusion advocates, HIV/AIDS denialists, 9/11 "Truthers," birthers, creationists, moon hoax believers, or Holocaust deniers. For instance, Mike Adams and Joe Mercola will tell you that the government in the…
oracknows | June 10, 2012A couple of weeks ago, I was horrified to learn of a new "biomed" treatment that has been apparently gaining popularity in autism circles. Actually, it's not just autism circles in which this treatment is being promoted. Before the "autism biomed" movement discovered it, this particular variety of "miracle cure" has been touted as a treatment for cancer, AIDS, hepatitis A,B and C, malaria, herpes, TB, and who knows what else. I'm referring to something called MMS, which stands for "miracle mineral solution." As I pointed out when I discovered its promotion for various maladies and then later…
oracknows | June 7, 2012I've lost track of how many times over the last 7 years I've mentioned that naturopathy is not science-based. The evidence is overwhelming. All you have to do is to took at the wide variety of quackery that fits comfortably into naturopathic practice to realize that most of naturopathy is quackery. Traditional Chinese medicine? Check. Various "energy healing"? Check. "Detoxification" woo? Check. Homeopathy?
Check.
I brought up this point last year when I pointed out that you can't have naturopathy without homeopathy. I based this assessment on the fact that not only his homeopathy a required…
oracknows | June 5, 2012Remember Vox Day?
Newer converts to the glory that is Orac (or at least to the ego that is Orac) might not know who Vox is because it's been a while since I've discussed his antiscience attitudes. By and large, this is probably a good thing, given that Vox denies evolution, has been antivaccine from way back, and apparently thinks nothing of suggesting that the U.S. emulate Hitler's methods of ejecting Jews from Germany to take care of our illegal immigrant problem. Truly, Vox is an example of crank magnetism at work. Particularly amusing is the way that he trumpets his membership in Mensa…
oracknows | June 5, 2012A very sad bit of news has come to my attention, courtesy of a reader. Billie Bainbridge has died of her brainstem cancer.
Regular readers might remember this unfortunate young girl, who was diagnosed with a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma of the brainstem last year. The tumor was inoperable, and, unfortunately, Billie's parents turned, as all too frequently happens, to a dubious doctor by the name of Stanislaw Burzynski. Dr. Burzynski, as you will recall, is a doctor in Houston who claims to have discovered and purified anti-cancer compounds from urine (which he dubbed "antineoplastons")…
oracknows | May 31, 2012I've pointed out before that pover the last couple of years I've become a bit of a fan of old time radio, having discovered Radio Classics on Sirius XM Radio. I don’t remember how I discovered it, but I rapidly became hooked on shows like Suspense, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, The Whistler, Gunsmoke, Dragnet, The Six Shooter, and The Adventures of Sam Spade (the Howard Duff episodes, of course). Then, of course, there's The Story of Dr. Kildare. This particular radio show stared Lew Ayres as Dr. Kildare and Lionel Barrymore as the irascible Dr. Leonard Gillespie (the latter of whom was…
oracknows | May 30, 2012Remember Dr. Jay?
Regular readers know about whom I speak. I'm talking about Dr. Jay Gordon, pediatrician to the stars' children. Dr. Jay has been a fixture on this blog on and off for seven years, first having popped in as a commenter way back on Respectful Insolence, Mark 1, when I first noted him promoting antivaccine nonsense claiming against all science that vaccines cause austism on—where else?—that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post. Since then, Dr. Jay has assiduously denied that he is antivaccine, all the while spewing antivaccine canards hither, thither, and yon…
lborkowski | May 29, 2012By Kim Krisberg
Wally Reardon stopped climbing towers for a living back in 2002 due to an injury. He had spent years putting up communication antennas anywhere employers wanted them — smokestacks, buildings, grain silos, water tanks. Just about anything that rose up into the sky, Reardon would find a way to scale it. It was exhilarating.
"I can't explain that freedom that we felt," Reardon told me. "I just liked the adventure of climbing towers. I just totally loved it. It was a crazy lifestyle and we were like a bunch of nomads. We lived by our own rules."
It was also dangerous. In fact,…
oracknows | May 25, 2012It's that time of year again.
What am I talking about? Regular readers know. They know that sometime around the Memorial Day weekend every year, usually beginning a couple of days before the extended weekend and into the weekend itself, there lands in the Chicago area a quackfest of such unrelenting quackitude that it has to be seen to be believed. Basically, it's the antivaccine and autism "biomed" movement Woodstock, except that it happens every year. Any and every quack and die-hard antivaccinationist who still believes believes against all evidence that vaccines cause autism is usually…
oracknows | May 24, 2012Well, screwed up transition to WordPress or not, I think it's time to get back to the business of doing what Orac does best: Laying down the Insolence, Respectful and Not-So-Respectful. While the remaining bugs are being ironed out, I'll work on trying to get the blog's appearance back to the way I like it as I harass the Seed/NatGeo overlords to fix things up for the benefit of you, my readers. (Well, it's also to my benefit, too. Using WordPress the way it's configured now is a real PITA, if you know what I mean.) I thought about wandering over to that despicable den of antivaccine iniquity…
oracknows | May 14, 2012I acquiesce.
I know that I'm not going to have a lot of control over my selection of blogging material for a given day when I see more than one or two requests for an analysis of an article. So it was, when links like these were showing up in my e-mail:
Acupuncture May Help Ease Symptoms of COPD
Acupuncture May Be Worth a Shot for COPD: Small Study Shows Acupuncture May Help People With COPD Breathe Easier
These two news stories refer to a study from Japan by Suzuki et al published online yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine entitled A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial of…
oracknows | May 10, 2012One of my newer blogging interests is the "alternative" cancer doctor named Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Although I had heard of him years ago, mainly in the context of his desperate patients tapping into the generosity of kind-hearted strangers to pay for his "antineoplaston" therapy, I hadn't really written much about him until very recently. About six months ago, Burzynski came to my attention because of his clinic's use of an Internet legal thug named Marc Stephens, who threatened skeptical bloggers with legal action after they had criticized the Burzynski Clinic and then later disavowed him…
oracknows | May 7, 2012It's no secret that over the years I've been very critical of a law passed nearly 20 years ago, commonly referred to as the DSHEA of 1994. The abbreviation DSHEA stands for about as Orwellian a name for a law as I can imagine: the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Of course, as we've pointed out time and time again, the DSHEA is not about health, and it's certainly not about education. Indeed, perhaps my favorite description of this law comes from blog bud and all around awesome internist Dr. Peter Lipson, who refers to it as a "travesty of a mockery of a sham." Rather, it's about…
oracknows | April 30, 2012I realize I repeat this a lot, but it bears repeating a lot. Vaccines are, without a doubt, one of the greatest advances in health care devised by the human mind. Arguably, vaccination campaigns have saved more lives and prevented more suffering and death than pretty much any other medical preventative intervention ever invented. I realize that I tick off antivaccinationists when I say that, but I don't care. Actually, I do care. I kind of like ticking off antivaccinationists using science. You didn't think I've been blogging for seven years purely out of a sense of duty to humanity, science…