Medicine
oracknows | February 15, 2012It's been a while since I mentioned Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston doctor who has somehow managed over the last thirty-plus years to treat cancer patients with something he calls "antineoplastons" without ever actually producing strong evidence that they actually cure patients, increase the chances of long-term survival, or even improve disease-free progression. Although there was a tiny bit of prior plausibility behind the concept--albeit only very tiny--back in the 1980s, the relentless drip, drip, drip of negative evidence, coupled with Burzynski's failure to advance his therapy…
oracknows | February 14, 2012One of the most potent strategies used by promoters of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)--or, as its proponents like to call it these days, "integrative medicine" (IM)--is in essence an argumentum ad populum; i.e., an appeal to popularity. Specifically, they like to use the variant of argumentum ad populum known as the "bandwagon effect," in which they try to persuade patients and physicians that they should get with the IM program because, in essence, everyone else is doing it and it's sweeping the nation. Not coincidentally, this is one type of method of persuasion much favored…
oracknows | February 12, 2012If there's one form of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) that I find more tolerable than most, it's massage therapy. The reason, of course, is that, whatever else anyone claims about massage, there's no doubt that it feels good.
All too often, however, massage therapists ruin a perfectly good massage by imposing pseudoscientific and quack claims on it, such as claims that they are stimulating acupressure points or their adoption of the language of "energy healing." So it was with a bit of trepidation (but also more than a bit of interest) that I took a look at some…
oracknows | February 10, 2012Work called last night. (It happens.) Basically, I had two deadlines for two big things (finishing reviewing the grants assigned to me for study section and a major writeup for a project for my job). Unfortunately, both of them were today. I realized as I perused old posts that I hadn't reposted this one in over five years. So, unless you're a long time reader, it's definitely new to you. More importantly, it reminds me that I don't write about thins like this much anymore. Certainly I rarely do personal anecdotes or straight medical blogging much anymore. Maybe I should do more.
[NOTE: This…
oracknows | February 6, 2012Way back in the day, when I first encountered antivaccine views in that wretched Usenet swamp of pseudoscience, antiscience, and quackery known as misc.health.alternative, there was one particular antivaccine lie that disturbed me more than just about any other. No, it wasn't the claim that vaccines cause autism, the central dogma of the antivaccine movement. Even ten years ago, that wasn't a particularly difficult myth to refute, and, with the continuing torrent of negative studies failing to find even a whiff of a hint of a whisper of a correlation between vaccination and autism, refuting…
oracknows | January 25, 2012It's been nearly a year since I last discussed a most unusual malady. Part of the reason is that the opportunity to discuss it hasn't occurred recently; usually I need some spark or incident to "inspire" me to write about something, and there just hasn't been any Morgellons news that's caught my eye since then. However, another part of the reason, I must admit, is that writing about this particular condition almost always brings sufferers out of the woodwork, castigating me the way antivaccinationists like to castigate me for challenging the scientific basis of their preferred pseudoscience.…
lborkowski | January 24, 2012Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released some disappointing news: several demonstration projects aiming to contain growth in healthcare spending are not showing cost savings. Specifically, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have been focusing on programs involving either disease management and care coordination or value-based payment systems for the fee-for-service Medicare population. A CBO issue brief reviews programs in both these categories that have been conducted over the past two decades, and I'm particularly interested in what it says about the disease…
oracknows | January 23, 2012I've been an observer and student of the antivaccine movement for nearly a decade now, although my intensive education began almost seven years ago, in early 2005, not long after I started blogging. It was then that I first encountered several "luminaries" of the antivaccine movement both throughout the blogosphere and sometimes even commenting on my blog itself. I'm talking about "luminaries" such as J.B. Handley, who is the founder of Generation Rescue and was its leader and main spokesperson; that is, until he managed to recruit spokesmodel Jenny McCarthy to be its public face, and Dr. Jay…
oracknows | January 19, 2012It's a new year, but some topics remain the same. One of these is the case of the highly dubious cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have discovered anticancer compounds in the blood known as antineoplastons, conducts "clinical trials" for which he charges patients and whose results he are largely unpublished, and of late has started marketing a do-it-yourself "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy" that--surprise! surprise!--almost always involves antineoplastons. More importantly, contrary to Dr. Burzynski's claim that he doesn't use chemotherapy and that his therapy…
oracknows | January 8, 2012Three and a half years ago, I bought a new car. The reason why I mention this as a means of beginning this post is because that car had something I had never had in a car before, namely Sirius XM satellite radio preinstalled. Curious, I subscribed, and I now barely listen to regular radio anymore. A couple of years after I had bought the car, a new channel was added to the lineup, a channel called Radio Classics. I don't know how I discovered it, but I rapidly became hooked on what's commonly referred to as old time radio. Basically, that's classic radio of the sort that was broadcast between…
pharyngula | January 6, 2012Poor Andy. Once upon a time, he had the power to kill children just by doing some very bad science and writing a few very bad papers, and now he's reduced to living in Texas and being supported by mobs of New Age cranks. He's powerless and bored, but his ego is still being inflated by sycophants…so what does he do? He decides to sue the British Medical Journal and journalist Brian Deer for defamation.
He has no medical career left. His entire life is now tied to his anti-vaccine crusade, and he's got nothing to contribute, other than his status as a martyr to the cause, so what he's done now…
oracknows | January 4, 2012If there's one thing that a crank, quack, pseudoscientist, or anti-vaccine propagandist doesn't like, it's having the light of day shined upon his activities. In fact, so much do they hate it that they have a distressing tendency to respond to science-based criticism not with science-based rebuttals (mainly because they can't given that they don't have any science to support them) but rather with legal threats. Sometimes these legal threats progress beyond just threats and into legal action, usually libel suits designed not to be compensated for damage to reputation but rather to intimidate…
oracknows | January 4, 2012Let's face it. The vast majority of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM) therapies are nothing more than placebo medicine. This should be so abundantly clear to readers who have followed this blog, Science-Based Medicine, and/or Neurologica Blog more than a few weeks that I shouldn't have to repeat it yet again, but I feel that it bears repeating today as an introduction to today's subject matter. CAM/IM is almost all placebo medicine, and placebos effects are poorly understood (or even misunderstood), even among physicians. It is this misunderstanding…
oracknows | January 2, 2012I kind of miss Peter Lipson on ScienceBlogs and wish he were still around. I realize it's been nearly a year and a half since he departed, but it's been a bit lonely here being the only physician blogging about quackery, the role of science in medicine, and other skeptical topics related to medicine. This point was driven home when I happened to come across a post he wrote the other day entitled Another crack at medical cranks. In it, Dr. Lipson discusses one characteristic that allows medical cranks and quacks to attract patients, namely the ability to make patients feel wanted, cared for,…
oracknows | December 31, 2011I know I said I'd probably chill this weekend and not post anything new until after New Years, but another thing showed up in my in box that--shall we say?--inspired me to post another quickie. It's Medscape's list of the Physicians of the Year: Best and Worst. It starts with the worst, and guess who shows up first?
Andrew Wakefield, who is described thusly:
Wakefield's MMR-Autism Vaccine Study an "Elaborate Fraud"
In January, the BMJ published a series of 3 articles and editorials charging that the study published in The Lancet in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield (pictured above) and colleagues…
kcollins | December 23, 2011The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world's foremost biomedical research center and the U.S. federal government's focal point for such research, is returning to the Festival as a major Sponsor and Exhibitor, bringing with it a bevy of high-caliber excitement in medical science that helped attract scores of visitors to last year's finale Expo.
"After participating in 2010, there was really no question about our desire to return to the Festival," says Bruce Fuchs, Ph.D., Director, NIH Office of Science Education. "We got the chance last year to introduce some exciting new ways to…
kbonham | December 21, 2011This entry is cross posted from the the SITN Flash, a bimonthly publication written and edited by Harvard graduate students. You can find my piece, as well as archives of previous articles written by many graduate students at the Science in the News website.
In 1985, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began tracking the prevalence of obesity in the United States. Since then, a clear trend has emerged: obesity is on the rise. The maps below compare obesity levels across the United States in 2004 and 2008:
It's clear that the number of people with obesity is growing, and has been as long we…
oracknows | December 18, 2011Every so often, someone will take a great deal of umbrage at my use of the term "antivaccine." The assumption behind criticism directed at me (and others) when we use such terms is that we throw the term about without a care, using it as a weapon unjustly and incorrectly to smear parents who are in reality "pro-safe vaccine." Of course, what antivaccine activists and their apologists don't realize (or conveniently forget) is that I view the term "antivaccine" as having a fairly specific definition, and it's not simply to describe anyone who questions the efficacy or safety of vaccines. If…
oracknows | December 15, 2011I thought I'd be leaving the topic of Dr. Stanislaw Burzysnki and his combination of Personalized Cancer Therapy for Dummies-level "personalized, gene-targeted cancer therapy" coupled with his "cancer-curing" antineoplastons, which have morphed into an orphan HDAC inhibitor used off-label as part of his pricey everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" combination of targeted therapies and old-fashioned chemotherapy. After all I figured that there would probably be nothing new to say before sometime in January, when he is schedule to appear before the Texas Medical Board to answer for his dubious…
oracknows | December 11, 2011Over the last couple of weeks, I've been spending a lot of time (and, characteristically, verbiage) analyzing the phenomenon known as Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, his "cancer cure" known as antineoplastons, and his incompetent version of "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy." In this third and final part, I want to come back to antineoplastons, because it has been pointed out to me that there is an aspect of this story that has received little attention. One of my readers in particular has helped enormously. I wish I could credit this person by name to express my gratitude, but, for reasons…