oracknows | November 28, 2009The day before the Thanksgiving holiday, I wrote about a serious contender for the worst medical reporting of the year, if not the decade, specifically how credulous reporters had swarmed all over the case of a Belgian man named Rom Houben. If you don't remember or haven't heard about the details, feel free to peruse the link I just cited, but I'll give you the brief rundown. Basically, Rom Houben is an incredibly unfortunate man who was involved in a motor vehicle crash 23 years ago at age 23. As a result, he suffered a severe head injury and was diagnosed as being in a persistent…
oracknows | November 27, 2009I happen to be fortunate enough this year to have taken the Friday after Thanksgiving off, and it is a very good thing indeed. However, this morning, having indulged in the American tradition of stuffing myself full of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and various other most excellent and hearty foods, all accompanied by some hearty ale. What that means is that I'm still suffering some of the after effects of food coma. What that further means for the blog is that I don't feel up to tackling something that will require me to exercise my neurons too much. So, in my food-induced haze, I asked…
oracknows | November 26, 2009It's Thanksgiving here in the States; so I plan on taking the day off from blogging that I might partake of the American custom of stuffing myself to the point of unconsciousness while hanging out with my family.
In the meantime, bow before the genius of the Muppets, as they perform one of my favorite songs of all time:
I thought it appropriate for the holiday, given its beginning. The use of Beaker in this video was particularly inspired.
oracknows | November 25, 2009You know, I have three manuscripts in the hopper with two of them having recently been returned to me with reviewers' comments. Frustratingly, one of these is a manuscript that I've been trying to get published for nearly a year now. Given that I appear to have some work to do over the long holiday weekend coming up in order to answer reviewer criticisms and get the manuscripts ready for resubmission (you know what I'll be doing either Friday or Saturday--and it won't be shopping), I truly appreciate this bit of advice on how to deal with the wayward reviewer who doesn't appreciate the…
oracknows | November 24, 2009Remember how I nominated a truly execrable local news report about Desiree Jennings as a serious contender for the worst reporting of the year, perhaps even of the decade? It had everything, and I seriously doubted that anything would challenge it for credulous supremacy any time soon.
How wrong I was. Check out this video:
Then read these stories:
'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear': Man trapped in 23-year 'coma' reveals horror of being unable to tell doctors he was conscious
Trapped 'coma' man: How was he misdiagnosed?
What a compelling story! Or is it? Let's find out by first…
oracknows | November 24, 2009As hard as I find it to believe, the fifth anniversary of this blog is fast approaching. When I started this whole endeavor, it was more or less on a whim that struck me on a cold, dreary, gray Saturday in December, and I had no idea that five years later I'd still be at it, much less that I'd have this many readers. One thing that trying to apply a skeptical and scientific world view to various pseudoscience has allowed me to do, more than just the occasional fit of depression at looking at pseudoscience now, comparing it to pseudoscience then and back in my Usenet days in the late 1990s and…
oracknows | November 23, 2009I hate to revisit this case again. However, some of my readers have sent me links to something that compels me to dig up the rotting corpse of Generation Rescue's despicable attempt to use the suffering of a troubled young woman to push the idea that vaccines are harmful. I'm referring, of course, to the Desiree Jennings case. As you recall, Desiree Jennings is a 25-year-old woman who claimed to have developed dystonia after receiving the seasonal flu vaccine back in August. Based on the disconnect between her symptoms and what real cases of dystonia look like, discovery of what was very…
oracknows | November 22, 2009There are times when I look back, and I can't believe I've been at it this long. It's not just the blogging, the fifth anniversary of which is rapidly approaching for me. Hard as it is to believe, not only have I become a "venerable" medical and skeptical blogger, but there are actually a lot of people who like to read what I regularly lay down. It's not false humility when I say I'm still shocked when I contemplate that. However, when you add to the blogging my time on that Internet wilderness known as Usenet, I've been fighting the good fight against pseudoscience for close to 12 years now…
oracknows | November 21, 2009Before I try to leave this topic for a while (which, like so may topics in the past, has temporarily taken over the blog for the last few days), one of the comments I've kept hearing since I started blogging about the new USPSTF mammography guidelines is something along the lines of, "Well, if the government runs health care, naturally politics will impact any attempts at science-based guidelines. That may be true, but in fact excessive politicization has always been a problem in that area, particularly for breast cancer. There's a good interview with to Dr. Barron Lerner, associate professor…
oracknows | November 21, 2009It's time for another installment of that venerable (gasp!) blog carnival of skepticism, science, and critical thinking, The Skeptics' Circle. This time, it's the 124th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, and it's finally landed, late but still brimming with skeptical goodness at Beyond the Short Coat.
Next up, two weeks hence, on December 3, will be TechSkeptic at Effort Sisyphus. His instructions for submitting your work are here. General instructions for what we look for in a Skeptics' Circle entry are here. So, by the way, is the schedule. If you're interested in hosting one of these puppies…
oracknows | November 21, 2009A lesson that's worth learning. Of course, I only wish people ignored vaccine denialists; unfortunately, enough people don't that vaccines are a frequent blog topic for me:
oracknows | November 20, 2009As I discussed in detail when I analyzed them, the new USPSTF recommendations for screening mammography for breast cancer have sparked a debate that has degenerated from a scientific and public policy debate into pure emotional rhetoric. When last I visited this topic, yesterday, I had intended it to be my last post for a while, perhaps ever. However, the amount of idiocy that I was dealing with became so overwhelming and the post grew to even huger than Orac-ian proportions. So I decided to split the post into two parts, because the particular argument I'm about to discuss deserves its very…
oracknows | November 19, 2009I knew when I first heard about them that the new United States Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations on breast cancer screening would be controversial. I tried to discuss these guidelines and the issues involved in a calm and rational way, relatively devoid of Insolence, Respectful or not-so-Respectful, yesterday, pointing out that screening guidelines were clearly due for revision but also recognizing the problems with the USPSTF recommendations and valid criticisms of them. In the end, I concluded that, among the critics, the ASCO discussion of the proposed guidelines…
oracknows | November 18, 2009"Early detection saves lives."
Remember how I started a post a year and a half ago saying just this? I did it because that is the default assumption and has been so for quite a while. It's an eminently reasonable-sounding concept that just makes sense. As I pointed out a year and a half ago, though, the question of the benefits of the early detection of cancer is more complicated than you think. Indeed, I've written several posts since then on the topic of mammography and breast cancer, the most recent of which I posted just last week. As studies have been released and my thinking on…
oracknows | November 17, 2009If you want a dose of science and rationality about the H1N1 flu pandemic, and you need it now, check out The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Led by Steve Novella, the discussion involves more than one friend of the blog, if you know what I mean and can be downloaded here.
oracknows | November 17, 2009Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in again.
Yes, I know I've used this clip before at least twice and the line in it several more times over the last couple of years. However, sometimes it's just so completely appropriate to how I'm feeling about a topic I'm about to write about that I just don't care and have to use it again. This is one of those times. The 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award bestowed upon him by the Atheist Alliance International (a.k.a. Bill Maher, anti-vaccine comedian and host of Real Time With Bill Maher, has decided, after an all too brief…
oracknows | November 16, 2009In case you've forgotten, it's only two days until that festival of critical thinking, that feast of reason, The Skeptics' Circle to land over at Beyond the Short Coat. Instructions to submit can be found here.
Please help make this Circle another success!
oracknows | November 16, 2009The New York Times has been periodically running a series about the "40 years' war" on cancer, with most articles by Gina Kolata. I've touched on this series before, liking some parts of it, while others not so much. In particular, I criticized an article one article that I thought to be so misguided about how the NIH grant system leads researchers to "play it safe" and how we could cure cancer if we could just fund "riskier" research that I had to write an extended screed about the misconceptions in the article. The latest installment, Medicines to Deter Some Cancers Are Not Taken, also by…
oracknows | November 15, 2009Since I seem to have attracted several truly idiotic Holocaust deniers in the comments after this post, including, believe it or not, Eric Hunt, the anti-Semite who attacked Elie Wiesel at a San Francisco hotel in 2007 and who now runs a blog full of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism where he recently bragged about attending an appearance by arch-Holocaust denier David Irving and bleating about a vacuous legal suit he's bringing against Steven Spielberg and Irene Weisberg Zisblatt over what he considers to be a "defamatory" documentary.
How do I deserve such "honors"?
In any case, while I'm…
oracknows | November 13, 2009Remember how I proudly proclaimed the other day that I gotten my H1N1 flu vaccine? Maybe I shouldn't have been so happy. After all, if Eric is right, then the H1N1 vaccination program is nothing more than a socialist plot by Obama-Hitler to poison Wall Street executives, and I fell for it!
The shame. The shame.