oracknows | January 23, 2010Oh, yes, my brothers and sisters, we have done it!
My pharma paymasters are very, very pleased indeed with me and all of their other blogging and Twittering minions. Very, very pleased indeed. In fact, they are cackling with glee over the discomfiture of one of their greatest enemies, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger! This brave rebel's plan to attack the conspiracy by winning a Shorty Award in Health has been thwarted, thanks to the efforts of you and me, oh my brothers and sisters, and The Health Ranger has gone completely mental about it:
I was set to take the top prize, and Dr.…
oracknows | January 22, 2010One week ago, The Chicago Tribune added yet another excellent addition to its recent series of articles exposing the dark underbelly of the anti-vaccine movement and, more importantly, the quackery that permeates the "autism biomedical" movement promoted by anti-vaccine groups such as Age of Autism. The first installment in the series, written by Tribune reporters Trine Tsouderos and Pat Callahan, examined Mark and David Geier's Lupron protocol for autism (which I had written about three years ago under the title Why not just castrate them?), and the second shone a light under the rock…
oracknows | January 21, 2010Last night was grant crunch time to get a truly serviceable draft to my collaborators today as promised, leaving enough time to revise it by the February 5 deadline. That means the blog has to take a hit today, which is a shame, because Joe Mercola and Age of Autism have laid down some idiocy this week that I'm just dying to take down. Oh, well, it'll wait, and if it won't I'm sure there'll be new idiocy to take down (or, if I need a break, some good science to discuss) when I come up for air again. (In the case of Mercola, it's part one of a promised three part series; so waiting until he's…
oracknows | January 20, 2010Last night was grant crunch time to get a truly serviceable draft to my collaborators today as promised, leaving enough time to revise it by the February 5 deadline. That means the blog has to take a hit today, which is a shame, because Joe Mercola and Age of Autism have laid down some idiocy this week that I'm just dying to take down. Oh, well, it'll wait, and if it won't I'm sure there'll be new idiocy to take down (or, if I need a break, some good science to discuss) when I come up for air again. (In the case of Mercola, it's part one of a promised three part series; so waiting until he's…
oracknows | January 20, 2010If you ever want to get a sense of the scale of the universe and how insignificant our little planet is compared to the scope of it all, here's something really cool to put things in perspective, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History's Astronomy Picture of the Day:
It'd be really cool if it were physically possible to travel that fast and see what this video shows. It really is amazing, this universe of ours.
oracknows | January 20, 2010Although I have a Twitter account, I really don't use it all that often, other than having set up an automatic feed to Tweet all my new posts for the blog. True, I do from time to time have flurries of activity (usually when I'm trapped in a particularly boring conference) or am inspired to tweak J.B. Handley or other anti-vaccine kooks when they start Tweeting nonsense, but for the most part I remain a blogging kind of a guy. One could argue whether it's my tendency towards logorrhea on the blog rendering me incapable of hewing to the 140 character limit for Twitter, but whatever the reason…
oracknows | January 19, 2010I'd like to start this post by thanking a commenter named Paul Grenville. He provided me with this blogging material and, indeed, may have supplied me with material for two blog posts. He did it by showing up in an old post about a homoepath named Jeremy Sherr, who has been bringing woo to the natives, so to speak, by treating HIV/AIDS patients in Africa with homeopathy. Sherr, as you may recall, Sherr had announced his plans to do "clinical trials" using homeopathy for HIV/AIDS and even bragged about treating Tanzanians with quackery. He then tried--shall we say?--to revise history by making…
oracknows | January 18, 2010The double standard of the anti-vaccine "autism biomed" movement never ceases to amaze me.
Imagine if you will, that a pharmaceutical company examined a chemical used for industrial purposes. Imagine further that the chemical this pharmaceutical company decided to look at originated as an industrial chelator designed to separate heavy metals from polluted soil and mining drainage. Imagine still further that that pharmaceutical company wanted to use that chemical as a treatment for autism, a chelator to be given to children. Finally, imagine that the drug company was giving this chemical to…
oracknows | January 17, 2010While I'm working today, enjoy some bizarre cartoon awesomeness from Max Fleischer, courtesy of Boing-Boing:
Truly amazing. And 80 years old, too, with a wicked jazz soundtrack. The Fleischer brothers rule.
oracknows | January 16, 2010...for the 128th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, being held over at Ionian Enchantment.
It's another great one!
And, as usual, it's never too early to think about submitting your work to the next edition of the Skeptics' Circle, to be held on January 28 at SkeptVet. Hmmm. I wonder if he'll take on some animal woo. In any case, here are the guidelines and the schedule. We're good through February, but could use some more hosts to keep this tradition going.
oracknows | January 15, 2010
Although there's been plenty of woo this week (Harriet Denz-Penhey, anyone?), it hasn't been the truly entertaining woo that I so love, you know, the kind of woo of Your Friday Dose of Woo, my long-standing (albeit now intermittent) excursion into the depths of alt-med silliness so over-the-top that it requires--nay, demands!--some serious not-so-Respectful Insolence, but in a more light-hearted way. After all, it's Friday, and what better way to get ready for the weekend than with a little visit to Dr. Orac's Emporium of Quackery and Pseudoscience known as Your Friday Dose of Woo, as long…
oracknows | January 14, 2010You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off the ol' Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim
- Jim Croce
I love it when a commenter gives me blogging material.
Let's face it. Blogging is a tough hobby. As much as I do love it so, sometimes I'm at a loss for blogging material. Some would argue that when that happens but not me. Why? Because the blogosphere will provide. At least, it has each and every time that I've ever run into difficulties. Of course, it's even nicer when blogging material is delivered up to me right there in the…
oracknows | January 13, 2010People fear chemotherapy.
Some of this fear is not unreasonable, but a lot of it is a vestige of older days, when chemotherapy was much more unpleasant and even at times horrific. However, contrary to the old alt-med trope of chemotherapy as "pure poison" that makes you sicker than cancer, advances in chemotherapy and supportive management that minimizes nausea and other side effects have made chemotherapy easier to bear for many people. Last year, James Randi underwent surgery and chemotherapy for what sounds like colorectal cancer, although he refers to it as "intestinal" cancer. Be that as…
oracknows | January 13, 2010The Onion or real life recommendations by cancer quacks? You be the judge.
Courageous Man Refuses To Believe He Has Cancer
Sometimes The Onion cuts a little too deeply, but this is not too far from "Secret" territory. Unfortunately for wishful thinking, reality doesn't care what you believe and has a way of asserting itself no matter how hard you wish.
oracknows | January 13, 2010Yesterday, I expressed dismay at how Dr. Mehmet Oz, the protege of Oprah Winfrey who now has his own popular syndicated daily show, recently named the quackery known as reiki as number one in his list of "Dr. Oz's ulimate alternatie medicine secrets," leading me to characterize him as having "gone completely over to the Dark Side." You, my readers, kindly provided me with a YouTube video of actual segments from the show in which Dr. Oz has a reiki master demonstrate reiki on an audience member:
Ugh. Get aload of this introduction:
Now you're about to see things that are going to challenge…
oracknows | January 12, 2010For some reason, I've tended to give Dr. Mehmet Oz a bit of a free pass when it comes to promoting woo. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I just haven't paid that much attention to him. Perhaps it's because, even when he was on Oprah's show, he didn't delve as deeply into the woo as her other frequent guests, such as Christiane Northrup, Suzanne Sommers, or Jenny McCarthy. The one or two times I saw him with Oprah, usually online because I'm never home to watch Oprah during the day and on those rare days when I am home on a weekeday, trust me, I don't watch Oprah. Then Dr. Oz got his own…
oracknows | January 11, 2010I've discussed why Barbara Loe Fisher is a hypocritical coward for trying to silence her opponents using the courts. Now Rebecca Watson, a.k.a., The Skepchick, schools Barbara Loe Fisher for in essence pissing on the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
For some reason, my irony meter didn't register the point that the Skepchick laid down. Perhaps it had already been so completely vaporized by the Loe Fisher's ranting about wanting a "fearless conversation about vaccines" hot on the heels of having tried to sue Dr. Offit for doing just that.
You know what's rather interesting, though? Ever…
oracknows | January 11, 2010Being a Doctor Who fan and all, I've often wondered what it would be like to be able to travel through time and visit times and places in history that I'm most interested in. For instance, being a World War II buff, I'd certainly want to be able to check out what every day life was like here in the U.S. during World War II. Given my affinity for psychedelic music and that I was only four years old during most of the Summer of Love, I'd think it cool to check out Haight-Ashbury, although I suspect my reaction to the reality of it would be similar to that of George Harrison when he checked it…
oracknows | January 9, 2010As regular readers know, I really like Tim Minchin's take on skepticism in general and on alternative medicine in particular. His piece de resistance thus far in his career is a "nine minute beat poem" entitled Storm, in which at a dinner party our performer is forced to deal with a female version of Mike Adams spewing nonsense about "natural remedies," how "science doesn't know everything," how "there's more" than just the material world and "you can't know anything," and how big pharma is just out for profit. Minchin's slapdown of this woo-filled nonsense is epic and hilarious.
It turns out…
oracknows | January 9, 2010I've said it before, and I've said it more times than I can remember. Purveyors of unscientific medicine don't have the goods. If they had the goods, then their nostrums wouldn't be called "alternative" medicine anymore; they'd just be medicine. Because they don't have the goods in the form of science and clinical evidence, all that leaves is to attack those who criticize their lack of science and clinical evidence. Most recently, we saw this in the reaction of the British Chiropractic Association, which is suing Simon Singh over the most bogus of reasons, and in the grande dame of the anti-…