oracknows | September 25, 2009There once was a time not so long ago--oh, say, four our five years--when the anti-vaccine fringe was looked upon as what it was: a fringe group, a bunch of quacks and quack advocates, all in essence one big conspiracy theory movement, in which vaccines are the One True Cause of Autism. At the time, there were two basic flavors of this movement, the American and the British variety. The British variety began back in the 1990s, fueled by Andrew Wakefield's pseudoscience, lack of ethics, bad science, and even potentially data falsification for his original 1998 Lancet study that claimed to have…
oracknows | September 24, 2009Yesterday, I wrote about Jake Crosby, the token college kid on the spectrum over at the happy home for wandering anti-vaccine zealots, Age of Autism. Specifically, I felt sorry for him because of his rather tortured bit of conspiracy mongering that postulated deep, dark connections between Adam Bly, the founder of Seed Media Group, the company he founded, ScienceBlogs, and multiple big pharma countries, all tied together with a breathtakingly tenuous connections all wrapped up into a big fat ball of nonsense.
Ooops. He did it again, with part 2 of Part II Seed Media's "Science"Blogs: A 180…
oracknows | September 23, 2009Hurt, but not defeated, the humongous giant clam....
Wait. Wrong story. Actually Science-Based Medicine is back. Finally. Go. Read. Enjoy. Particularly a bit about crank conferences.
oracknows | September 23, 2009Jake's hit pieces against Seed and me reminded me of something. They reminded me of just what it is that the anti-vaccine movement promotes, and the damage that I wish Jake would wake up and realize that the organization he has associated himself with causes a great deal of harm. Part of that harm derives from its antivaccine activities, which are custom-designed to discourage parents from vaccinating with unfounded fears of vaccines causing autism. However, there is another harm that the "vaccines cause autism" movement causes that is not related to the promotion of infectious disease that…
oracknows | September 23, 2009That Jake Crosby, he's a crazy mixed-up kid, but I kind of like him.
He seems like a nice enough and smart enough kid, but, sadly, he's fallen in with a bad crowd over at the anti-vaccine crank propaganda blog, Age of Autism, so much so that he's even blogging there, helping, whether he realizes it or not, to promote the message that vaccines cause autism and that various forms of biomedical quackery can somehow "cure" autism. I say "whether he realizes it or not" because he seems to have settled into the role of AoA's token young adult on the spectrum who promotes the party line. Indeed, he'…
oracknows | September 22, 2009Science-based Medicine, a place where sometimes a "friend" of mine pontificates, is temporarily down. Recently, the SBM crew moved the blog to a new server. Beginning over the last two or three weeks, the blog became buggy. Very buggy. Response times became painfully slow, and then last Friday SBM went down and stayed down nearly an entire day. Valiant efforts and arguing with the hosting company got it up and running again over the weekend, although it remained painfully slow to browse. I thought I had harkened back to those days of yore when I used to use a 9600 baud modem. Then, sometime…
oracknows | September 22, 2009I've often discussed how potentially misleading anecdotal evidence and experience can be. Indeed, I've managed to get into quite a few--shall we say?--heated discussions with a certain woo-friendly pediatrician, who, so confident in his own clinical judgment, just can't accept that his own personal clinical observations could be wrong or even horribly mislead him. Sadly, I've never managed to persuade him just how easy it is for us humans to be deceived or even to deceive ourselves.
However, just because anecdotal evidence can deceive us does not mean that it is worthless. Contrary to the…
oracknows | September 21, 2009The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Lengend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth returns again.
Or something.
What I do know is that the Wheel has turned once again and a new meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching. Indeed, it is less than three days away. On Thursday, September 24, the 120th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle will be hosted by Kristjan Wager at Pro-Science. He needs your submissions, and he needs them by Wednesday night. So give them to him. Check out the guidelines for…
oracknows | September 21, 2009Given how many of you read this blog and Science-Based Medicine, I thought I should make an announcement. Sometime this morning or early this afternoon, the Science-Based Medicine blog went down, returning only a cryptic message saying that the site has been "suspended." This is the second time it's gone completely down, the first being Friday for most of the day, and the performance of the site has been painfully slow all weekend, with interminable waits for page loads, etc.
The SBM team is aware of the problem. All I can say is that the problem is being worked on, but the technical guys are…
oracknows | September 21, 2009I've asked at least three times on this blog, "Is Bill Maher that ignorant?"
The first time was four and a half years ago, when, in a fit of germ theory denialism, Maher proclaimed erroneously that Louis Pasteur had "recanted" on his deathbed, while spewing nonsense hither and yon about how disease isn't primarily caused by microbes but by "aggregate toxicity," whatever that means in woo-speak. The second time I asked the question occurred in 2008, when Maher lectured David Letterman about "toxins" and and suggested that he consider giving up his heart drugs and pursue "natural" therapies.…
oracknows | September 20, 2009Three Imperial stormtroopers discuss the destruction of the Death Star on the first anniversary of its exploding:
Of course Palpatine must have known! The logic is inescapable. Why else would Darth Vader have been in his Tie fighter and not in the Death Star when Luke Skywalker blew it to kingdom come? Personally, I always thought it was because he was needed as the villain for the next couple of movies and so he had to escape, but that's just me.
oracknows | September 19, 2009The other day, I ripped a certain woo-meister whom regular readers all know and most, if not all, regular readers mostly despise, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com. As you may recall, a few days ago he slimed Patrick Swayze the day he died from pancreatic cancer, posting an article saying that Swayze was killed by chemotherapy and that he'd still be alive and Dirty Dancing today if he had only eschewed that horrible, evil Devil's brew of chemotherapy and gone with all "natural" cures. It was simply a followup of an article he wrote back in January saying in essence the same thing, although Adams…
oracknows | September 18, 2009Given how many of you read this blog and Science-Based Medicine, I thought I should make an announcement. Sometime earlier this morning after 7 AM but before around 10 AM, the Science-Based Medicine blog went down, returning only a cryptic message saying that the site has been "suspended."
The SBM team is aware of the problem, and, quite frankly, I'm disturbed that the site isn't back up yet. I can tell you (and many of you may have noticed) that the site's performance over the last week has, quite frankly, sucked, with slow as molasses page loading, frequent database errors, and general poor…
oracknows | September 18, 2009Somehow I don't think any cosmetics company today could get away with doing an experiment like this to prove how well its cold cream cleans the most dirt and makeup residue from a model's skin.
I'd also really love a copy of the "Atomic Test Booklet" that people could mail the company to request. You'd never guess from the title that it's about makeup. Also, I have to wonder. Some 50 or 60 years later:
Is the model in this commercial still alive?
How many skin cancers did she have removed from her face?
Inquiring minds wnat to know!
oracknows | September 18, 2009I just found out via one of the mailing lists I'm on of a very disturbing case in Kermit, Texas. Two nurses who were dismayed and disturbed by a physician peddling all manner of herbal supplements reported him to the authorities. Now, they are facing jail:
In a stunning display of good ol' boy idiocy and abuse of prosecutorial discretion, two West Texas nurses have been fired from their jobs and indicted with a third-degree felony carrying potential penalties of two-to-ten years' imprisonment and a maximum fine of $10,000. Why? Because they exercised a basic tenet of the nurse's Code of…
oracknows | September 17, 2009Even with the H1N1 pandemic flu going around you should still be vaccinated against the seasonal flu. revere has the details.
I guess that means Dr. Doug Bremner must think that revere is an idiot. After all, Bremner tells us that the flu vaccine is all a plot for big pharma to make money, don't you know? Subtlety and weighing of risk-benefit ratios in a manner that doesn't turn into an anti-big pharma rant is beyond him. Fortunately it is not beyond revere:
The truth is this. No one knows what's going to happen. We're all guessing. But in my estimation, the risk-benefit calculation for…
oracknows | September 17, 2009Pity poor Nick Gonzalez.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. After having used the same line when discussing the hugely enjoyable humiliation of the Godfather of HIV/AIDS denialism, Peter Duesberg, I couldn't resist using the same line to introduce my response to Dr. Gonzalez's woo-ful whine in response to the publication of the disastrous (for him and any patient unfortunate enough to be in the arm receiving his protocol) clinical trial that demonstrated about as unequivocally as it is possible to demonstrate that his "protocol" to treat pancreatic cancer is nothing more than as steaming and stinking…
oracknows | September 16, 2009It looks like my prediction about Patrick Swayze came true. Not that it was a stretch to foresee that the Woo-meister Supreme Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com would waste no time in violating the corpse of Patrick Swayze before he was even cold by using Swayze's death as an excuse to repeat once again his oft-repeated misinformation and lies about chemotherapy and "natural" therapies. After all, he did it before for Tony Snow, so why not Patrick Swayze? In fact, I strongly suspect that Adams had this rant written months ago, ready and waiting for Patrick Swayze's death. All he had to do then was…
oracknows | September 15, 2009This can't be right. As I was perusing the blog a little while ago, I noticed this:
That can't be right, can it? This blog can't be number one by any measure, be it the Healthcare100.com or anything else. It has to be a bug in the software. Top ten, I can believe. Number one, not so much.
But then, this blog passed the 5,000,000 mark a few weeks ago, and I didn't even notice. I must be getting jaded. Either that, or I'm full of crap with false modesty. Take your pick.
And I do think there must be a bug in the software somewhere to let me hit number one. I expect that the error will be…
oracknows | September 15, 2009Pity poor Peter Duesberg.
Back in the 1980s, he was on the top of the world, scientifically speaking. A brilliant virologist with an impressive record of accomplishment, publication, and funding, he seemed to be on a short track to an eventual Nobel Prize. Then something happened. The AIDS epidemic happened. Something about the AIDS epidemic led this excellent scientist in the late 1980s to fall directly into pseudoscience and crankery by latching onto and promoting the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS. Of course, at the time scientists didn't yet know a lot about the virus and how it slowly…