oracknows | February 4, 2010Here we go again (rest of the post below the fold because there is a video that autostarts):
"Irreprehensible"? "One in nine" are being diagnosed with autism? Where on earth did he get that figure? Can't CNN find more intelligent people to feature when it comes to reporting about the Wakefield retraction? Someone capable of putting together a rational argument, rather than a nearly incoherent bunch of conspiracy mongering strung together in seemingly random order? His arguments are painfully obtuse, and thus far there's only one skeptical voice in the comments.
On the other hand, this is…
oracknows | February 4, 2010I realize I complain periodically about when I get into what seems to me to be a rut in which I'm writing pretty much only about anti-vaccine lunacy. This is just such a week, when the news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, first with Andrew Wakefield's being found to have behaved unethically and dishonestly by the British General Medical Council, only to be followed up a few days later with the news that the editors of The Lancet had retracted his 1998 paper, the paper that started the MMR scare in the U.K. and launched a thousand autism quacks. Meanwhile, the cranks…
oracknows | February 3, 2010
You know I'm a sucker for a heartfelt plea from an anti-vaccine activist. That's why, upon seeing Kim Stagliano write in Age of Autism:
Hi, I'd appreciate your comments over at HuffPo on my post, The Censorship of Autism Treatment" HERE.
I had to admit that I heartily agree. That's why I'm asking my readers to take Ms. Stagliano up on her offer and head on over to comment on her post! Who says Orac is not a kind and benevolent box of blinking colored lights?
Even more amusingly, Kim's post was entitled The Censorship of Autism Treatment, which makes what she says next even more rich in…
oracknows | February 3, 2010If I am wrong I will be a bad person because I will have raised this spectre.
Andrew Wakefield, March 3, 1998.
Interview in The Independent.
The martyrdom of brave maverick Saint Andy continues apace, it would appear.
As you recall, last week, after an interminable proceeding that stretched out over two and a half years, the General Medical Council in the U.K. finally ruled on the question of whether Andrew Wakefield, the man whose incompetently performed, trial lawyer-backed study published in the Lancet in 1998, acted unethically. The answer, not surprisingly, was a resounding yes, or,…
oracknows | February 2, 2010Sure, this is old, but I hadn't seen a video quite this cool before. Behold, a human polymorphonuclear leukocyte (PMN, or neutrophil) on a blood film, "chasing" Staphylococcus aureus.
There are more videos of cells in action here.
It never ceases to amaze me how cells can detect biochemical gradients over such short distances and use them for navigation. I'm sure I'll find it just as fascinating right up until the day I can't think of science anymore.
oracknows | February 2, 2010I know I spent a fair bit of time last week slapping down Mike Adams, creator of NaturalNews.com website. In reality, he richly deserved it, as he has richly deserved it many times in the past. Indeed, were I so inclined, I could devote this blog to nothing but the deconstruction of the quackery and woo laid down each and every day by Mike Adams and his merry band of quacks, much as Kim Wombles does with the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism through her blog Countering Age of Autism, but I'd eventually get tired of it and so would you. Sometimes I do get tired of it.
This is not one…
oracknows | February 1, 2010...from, of all places, a Daily Kos diary.
Although the post itself is quite good, some of the comments make baby Jesus cry. There's even one repeating the old myth about H. pylori and how Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were supposedly "ostracized" for their "heresy" back in the 1980s.
Still, it's good to see that the GMC ruling is having an effect as far as spreading the message about Andrew Wakefield.
oracknows | January 31, 2010
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue.
Well, not really. Maybe it looks more like I picked the wrong NIH grant cycle to be submitting an R01. After all, the deadline for my getting my grant to my university's grant's office coincided very closely with the announcement of the General Medical Council's ruling in the Andrew Wakefield case on Thursday. As I pointed out in a brief post yesterday, the complete 143-page ruling can be found here (if you want to avoid AoA or Generation Rescue) or here (if you want to annoy J.B. Handley by showing traffic coming from this blog…
oracknows | January 31, 2010This may be a bit over the top, but it does rather point out what is in effect done when journalists lazily present "both sides" of issues that don't really have two sides, at least not two sides that are anywhere in the same universe as far as scientific validity:
I do rather think that they could have found a better example for "Western" versus "alternative" medicine. That part of the video was actually pretty dumb and, quite frankly, painfully unfunny. Come on! A Hulda Clark parody, where the alt-med practitioner claims that all cancer is caused by a liver fluke and that it can be cured…
oracknows | January 30, 2010Thanks to having been up all night Thursday night and most of the night a couple of days before that working on a grant, I know I haven't had a chance to write about the GMC's ruling on Andrew Wakefield's unethical conduct in conducting his "clinical research" that according to him linked the MMR vaccine to autism. That dubious and possibly even fraudulent research ultimately fueled the anti-vaccine movement in the U.K. and, aided and abetted by the sensationalistic and credulous U.K. media, Wakefield started an MMR scare that persists to this day, having led to vaccination uptake rates…
oracknows | January 29, 2010I've sort of alluded to it, but grant fever took over the last couple of days as the deadline approaches. Unfortunately, it happened right around the time when the GMC ruling on Andrew Wakefield came down and came down hard on him and his unethical behavior. Oh, well, as they say, it looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. In any case, I doubt I'll get to Wakers before Monday, if then, given that there might be other things that catch my interest by then. In the meantime, as I recover from pulling a couple of near all-nighters in a row, check out this Classic Insolence from…
oracknows | January 28, 2010...is, sadly, this:
Boomtown Rats - Up All Nightby epb21
It's times like these that my surgical residency training comes in handy.
Yep. As I've alluded to, it's been grant time, and this was my night. But the R01 is finished. I'll have my lab people go over it one last time for errors and typos, and then it's off to the university grants office. I hope.
That reminds me. As all NIH rats know, the real deadline for R01 grant submissions is February 5. At least that's the date when the NIH wants them. However, our grants office requires us to get the electronic package to it a whole week…
oracknows | January 28, 2010You knew it was coming. You knew from many previous incidents that it was inevitable:
Who knew Hitler was such a Mac geek?
Personally, although I think the iPad looks like a really cool device, I'm really not sure where it would fit into my life. I already have an iPhone, which I love, and I already have a MacBook Pro, which I also love. Given that, I just don't see the need for the iPad, at least not for me. However, I also know that I'm not the sort of person for whom the iPad was designed.
oracknows | January 28, 2010Faster than a blink of an eye (well, not really, but it sure seems that way sometimes) another fortnight has flown by, meaning that it's time yet again for another meeting of that venerable blog carnival of critical thinking, the Skeptics' Circle. This time around, we have our first ever veterinarian hosting. I could make jokes about the Skeptics' Circle going to the dogs, but I'll exercise some rare self-restraint and refrain from doing so. (Oh, wait...)
In any case, this time around, the 129th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is being held over at SkeptVet.
Head on over and check it out.…
oracknows | January 27, 2010And now for something completely different.
I've been on a bit of a tear the last few days beating on Mike Adams, someone who arguably deserves the title of Woo--meister Supreme, but it's important to remember that defending science-based medicine is more than just having a little fun every now and then slapping down quacks. It's also about turning the same skeptical eyes that recognize the woo that people like Adams, Mercola, and the anti-vaccine movement promote onto scientific medicine when appropriate. That's because, at its best, science-based medicine is always trying to improve…
oracknows | January 26, 2010Dammit.
I realize that this has been floating around the blogosphere for a couple of days, but when I first saw it at PZ's place, I thought that Chis Clarke had stolen someone's blogging strategy notebook, except that I thought he had stolen mine, so spot-on is his channeling of just the right style to take on pseudoscience mavens, quacks, and other purveyors of woo.
There's just one problem. It's way, way too short to have been stolen from my blogging playbook. It needs to be about two or three times as long, minimum. It also needs a few sentences like this:
This sentence contains tortured…
oracknows | January 26, 2010Almost two years ago, I discovered something that disturbed me greatly. Basically, I learned the story of an Air Force officer named Col. Richard Niemtzow, MD, PhD. Col. Niemtzow is a radiation oncologist who has over the last decade fallen deeply into woo. Specifically, he has become known for a technique that he has dubbed "battlefield acupuncture," a technique that he has promoted energetically (word choice intentional) and ceaselessly, to the point where, sadly, the military is starting to take it seriously even though the evidence Col Niemtzow has presented in favor of the technique is…
oracknows | January 25, 2010It's amazing how fast two weeks can slide by, but the 129th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching and will be landing Thursday, January 28 at The SkeptVet Blog. Blog-specific instructions for submitting your best skeptical blogging can be found here, while general guidelines can be found here.
This is the first time we've had a skeptical veterinarian host; so let's try to get him some great material to help him do a bang-up job. And if you have some good woo related to veterinary or animals to send in, so much the better.
oracknows | January 25, 2010
It's amazing how these "natural" medicine mavens reveal their true nature when faced with a little adversity. As you may recall, Mike Adams was eliminated from the running for a Shorty Award in Health, thanks to the cluelessness of his fans and followers. He immediately erupted into tirades full of conspiracy-mongering, as well as a hilariously off-base, spittle-flecked attack on "skeptics" that was so full of straw men that his adopted Central American home will probably have to import straw for its farm animals for the foreseeable future. As a result of his being eliminated, Mike Adams…
oracknows | January 24, 2010Mike Adams is confused.
I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn't have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there you go. Speaking of writing an NIH R01, that's exactly what I'm doing now, hence the decreased blogorrhea over the last few days, but sometimes trying to cram a five year project into the 13 pages (one page for specific aims and twelve to describe the project) makes my head hurt so much that reading and…