Medicine
oracknows | January 15, 2016I feel as though I'm experiencing an acid flashback to 2011, and I've never in my entire life once tried acid—or any mind-altering substance other than booze.
What am I talking about? Let's take a trip down memory lane, if you will, back to those halcyon days of—oh—five years ago. That was the time when I first took an interest in the Polish oncologist wannabe named Stanislaw Burzynski. Although I had mentioned him before because he featured prominently in Suzanne Somers' 2009 paean to quackery Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer–And How to Prevent Getting It in the First…
oracknows | January 12, 2016Every so often there are studies that I really mean to write about but, for whatever reason, don't manage to get to. Sometimes I get a chance to get back to them. Sometimes I don't. This time around I'm getting back to such a topic. This time around it's a topic I've been meaning to write about is based on a couple of studies that came out three weeks ago that illustrate why, even if a patient ultimately comes around to science-based treatment of his cancer, the delay due to seeking out unscientific treatments can have real consequences.Consider this (probably) the last unfinished bit of…
oracknows | January 7, 2016It's an understatement to say that I'm not exactly a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), the institute formerly known as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and, even a year after its name change, probably still better known by its old moniker. Just type "NCCAM" or "NCCIH" into the search box of this blog if you don't believe me. Basically, it's an institution forced upon the National Institutes of Health in the 1990s by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), a woo-friendly senator who believed that bee pollen cured his allergies…
lborkowski | December 31, 2015During the holiday season, Kim, Liz and I are taking a short break from blogging. We are posting some of our favorite posts from the past year. Here’s one of them, originally posted on July 27, 2015:
by Celeste Monforton, DrPH, MPH
The occupational health community, coal miners, their families and labor advocates are mourning the loss of physician Donald Rasmussen, 87.
For more than 50 years, he diagnosed and treated coal miners with work-related lung disease, first at the then Miners Memorial Hospital in Beckley, WV and later at his own black lung clinic. A lengthy story by John Blankenship…
oracknows | December 21, 2015One of the best things about blogging is that I don't feel obligated to cover a topic completely in one post because I know I can always write another one or revisit the topic later. It also allows me to look at what I like to call "variations on a theme" of various kinds of quackery (or anything else, for that matter). View this as a post looking at one such variation on a theme.
The theme this time is the tendency of antivaccine activists to demonstrate their utter cluelessness when it comes to designing clinical studies. This cluelessness virtually always manifests itself in the frequent…
oracknows | December 15, 2015Even though I've taken on the 'nym of a fictional computer in a 35-year-old British science fiction series whose key traits were an arrogant and condescending manner and the ability to tap into every computer of the galactic federation any time he wanted to, in reality I am just one person. That means, try as I might, I can't keep up with everything that might interest me enough to blog, much less blog it all. What that means is that occasionally something catches my attention, even though it's three months old. So it was with this article in—of all places—Elle magazine. It's about a favorite…
oracknows | December 11, 2015Although I don't write about him as much as I used to, there was a time a couple of years ago when Houston cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski was a frequent topic of this blog. His story, detailed in many posts on this blog and in an article I wrote for Skeptical Inquirer, is one that involves many facets, including an abysmal failure of the normal government agencies designed to protect patients from abuses like his to actually do their jobs and—oh, you know—protect patients. If you want an idea of how utterly impotent our regulatory agencies are, the Burzynski case is as good an example as…
oracknows | December 10, 2015Many are the "alternative" medicine therapies that I've examined with a skeptical eye over the years. The vast majority of them rest on concepts that range from pre-scientific to religious to outright pseudoscientific to—let's face it—the utterly ridiculous. Examples abound: Reflexology, reiki, tongue diagnosis, homeopathy, ear candling, cupping, crystal healing, urine drinking, detoxifying foot pads, "detox foot baths," and the like. The list goes on.
Of these, one of the most amazingly silly and ridiculous alternative therapies of them all, if not the most ridiculous—although, to be fair,…
oracknows | December 6, 2015To say that the relationship that antivaccine activists have with science and fact is a tenuous, twisted one is a major understatement. Despite mountains of science that says otherwise, antivaccinationists still cling to the three core tenets of their faith, namely that (1) vaccines are ineffective (or at least nowhere near as effective as health officials claim; (2) vaccines are dangerous, causing autism, autoimmune disease, neurodevelopmental disorders, diabetes, sudden infant death syndrome, and a syndrome that is misdiagnosed as shaken baby syndrome; and, of course, (3) the Truth (capital…
oracknows | November 24, 2015It is an article of faith among the antivaccine movement that vaccines are degrading the health of our children, such that vaccines cause autism, asthma, diabetes, and a number of other chronic diseases. You won't have to look far on most antivaccine websites to find claims that today's children are the sickest in history and insinuations, if not outright statements, that vaccines are at least part ofthe cause. If you've been following the antivaccine movement as long as I have (more than a decade) or even if you've only been following it one tenth as long, you are probably aware that one of…
lborkowski | November 23, 2015Last week was World Antibiotics Awareness Week, and a new study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases showed just how dire the antibiotics situation has gotten. Authors from the South China Agricultural University, the China Agricultural University, and other institutions identified a gene that confers resistance to a last-resort antibiotic, and then found that gene in E. coli isolates from 15% of raw meat samples, 21% of pigs about to be slaughtered, and 16% of hospital patients with infections. (The study is behind a paywall, but there's a helpful summary here.)
The authors warn that given…
oracknows | November 17, 2015The other day, I suddenly realized that it's been a long time since I've written about the Polish expat doctor in Houston who treats patients with advanced brain cancer with a concoction that he dubbed antineoplastons (ANPs). I'm referring, of course, to Stanislaw Burzynski who, despite the fact that he has no training in medical oncology, has treated thousands of cancer patients with ANPs beginning back in the late 1970s. Somehow, despite the fact that he's never even come close to showing that ANPs are effective and safe against the cancers for which he uses it, the FDA has, with a brief…
oracknows | November 15, 2015It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of naturopathy. It is, as my good bud Kimball Atwood has said, a prescientific system of medicine rooted in vitalism, the idea that there is a "life energy" and a "healing power of nature." Naturopaths invoke very simplistic concepts to explain the cause of disease, such as "toxins," widespread food allergies, gluten, imbalances in qi (the life force energy), and many other pseudoscientific principles. To give you an idea of the kind of pseudoscientific quackery naturopathy encompasses, consider this: You can't have naturopathy without homeopathy, which…
oracknows | November 10, 2015After nearly 11 years (!) at this blogging thing, I thought I had covered pretty much every medical topic a skeptic and supporter of science-based medicine would be interested in covering. However, if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that there's always something I've missed, some hole in my blogging oeuvre that needs to be filled. Perhaps when I've been at this for 20 years I'll have filled them all in. Even if that becomes true sometime in the next nine years, I will likely have only filled in the old gaps, while new ones will have formed. Dealing with pseudoscience is…
gregladen | October 26, 2015Here's a question for you: Historical records show that another pandemic will occur, but no one knows when. How do we create a mind shift among world leaders and people in general to start planning for the next one now?
This question is being posed in connection with the series premiere of National Geographic's "Fighting Pandemics" (November 1 at 9 pm ET on National Geographic Channel). The question is about pandemics, but the inspiration for the series, and the question, is the recent ebola pandemic in West Africa. I have a few thoughts, and I've been thinking about Ebola for a long time…
oracknows | October 21, 2015One of the things that feels the weirdest about having done the same job, having been in the same specialty, for a longer and longer time is that you frequently feel, as the late, great Yogi Berra would have put it, déjà vu all over again. This is particularly true in science and medicine, where the same issues come up again and again and again, often with the same arguments on either side. Sometimes the same players are even involved. So it is with mammography recommendations. Indeed, I'm feeling déjà vu all over again right now, as I read headlines like Women advised to get mammograms later…
oracknows | October 19, 2015Two of the great "icons"—if you can call them "great" given that they're icons but hardly "great"—of the antivaccine movement are Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. Over the last decade, they have arguably been the most influential people in the antivaccine movement. The reasons are simple. Let's look at Jenny McCarthy first. In 2007, when her child Evan was diagnosed with autism and she blamed MMR vaccine for it, McCarthy became virtually overnight the single most famous celebrity antivaccine advocate. With her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey, in 2008 she led an antivaccine march on Washington…
oracknows | October 16, 2015If there's one thing I've been consistent about, it's that, however ridiculous all the other woo I routinely discuss here is—homeopathy, reiki, reflexology, I'm talking to you and your friends—herbal medicine and supplements might have value because they might have a physiological effect that is beneficial in treating or preventing disease. Of course, if that's the case, it's because the herb or supplement contains chemicals that act as drugs. They're "dirty" drugs in that they are mixed with all sorts of other substances in the herb or supplement that might or might not have effects, which…
oracknows | October 15, 2015Oh, no, Nature. Not you. Not again.
It wasn't enough that you were busted shilling for traditional Chinese medicine with a big, glossy advertising supplement a few years ago. I thought you had learned your lesson after that, as you didn't do it again. Maybe I was wrong. Granted, your offense this time is not quite as bad as accepting cash from Saishunkan Pharmaceutical Co., ltd. and the Kitasato University Oriental Medicine Research Center to put together what was in essence pure propaganda for quackery, but, on the other hand, I do have to be worried that you might be thinking of backsliding…
oracknows | October 14, 2015One of the more depressing topics that I regularly write about includes of analyses of news stories of children with cancer whose parents decided to stop science-based treatment (usually the chemotherapy) and use quackery instead. There are, of course, variations on this theme, but these stories take form that generally resembles this outline: A child is diagnosed with a highly treatable cancer with an excellent cure rate. Standard science-based treatment is begun, but the child suffers severe side effects from the chemotherapy. After an incomplete course of chemotherapy, the parents, alarmed…