oracknows | August 8, 2009This may be a few months old, but I only just saw it the other night. Seems like it would work:
CreedocideUploaded by greenfaace. - See more comedy videos.
My only question is: Where is the other major monotheistic religion?
oracknows | August 7, 2009I'm soooo envious.
Why and of whom am I envious? I'll tell you. Phil Plait, a.k.a. The Bad Astronomer, attracts a more famous class of antivaccine loon. He's managed to attract Dr. Joe Mercola himself in the comments of a post about anti-vaccine zealots:
If you TRULY are interested in finding out the truth about this topic you are encouraged to attend the Fourth International Public Conference on Vaccines in Washington DC in October.
http://www.nvic.org/Events/overview.aspx
The top experts in the world on this topic will be presenting and you can really understand the science rather than…
oracknows | August 7, 2009Dr. Bob Sears is the bane of science- and evidence-based pediatricians everywhere. As pediatrician Dr. John Snyder relates, whenever he hears a parent say "I was reading Dr. Sears" or sees a patient in his office holding a copy of Dr. Sears' The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Choice for Your Child, he knows what's coming next: Resistance to vaccination. It would be one thing if this resistance were based on evidence or science-based concerns about the safety of vaccination, but it's not. As Dr. Snyder explains, while playing the "open-minded" "tell both sides" gambit, Dr. Sears credulously…
oracknows | August 6, 2009Further tweaking of the crank conspiracy theory that is the "birther" movement:
Obama Debunks Birther Conspiracy - watch more funny videos
If President Obama is a Cylon, maybe he was born in Kenya and Hawaii.
oracknows | August 6, 2009There is no doubt that the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical schools in this country represents a profound threat to science-based medicine. By mixing mysticism, non-science, and pseudoscience along with science-based medicine, medical schools are in essence endorsing quackery and elevating it to the same level as science-based and science-tested modalities. Worse, they're running the risk of training a generation of medical students accepting of this "integrating" woo with science, who can't recognize highly implausible treatments or recognize obvious quackery. By letting…
oracknows | August 5, 2009Did you know that acupuncture is very much related to astrology?
No, it's not just because both of woo. Rather, it's likely true that the whole concept of "meridians," those invisible "channels" through which our life energy (a.k.a. qi) allegedly flow were indirectly based on astrological signs, which had been used to guide points used by ancient healers for bloodletting. Indeed, far from being "ancient wisdom," by the middle of the second century, needling had been mostly abandoned and even banned by the Imperial Medical Academy in China and prohibited in Japan, only to be resurrected by…
oracknows | August 4, 2009Wow. After I wrote a post last week about the "birthers," cranks who believe that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, and therefore is not a natural born U.S. citizen, and therefore is not eligible to be President of the United States. Like all good conspiracy theorist cranks, they trot out all sorts of reasons why all the evidence showing that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii 48 years ago today is invalid or how there is a huge coverup. (Isn't there always in any good conspiracy theory?) Meanwhile, they constantly demand that they be "shown the birth certificate." As if that would shut them…
oracknows | August 4, 2009During the month of June on this blog, I got annoyed not once, but twice. First, I got annoyed at Sharon Begley for a truly annoying and evidence-free (other than cherry-picked anecdotes) broadside against the NIH for its "culture of caution" that, according to her, is largely responsible for the "lack of progress" against cancer over the last 38 years since President Richard Nixon declared "war on cancer." In essence, Begley blamed the need scientists have for publishing in the highest impact journals they can get their manuscripts into for "delaying" cures or, as I put it, "keeping teh…
oracknows | August 3, 2009Due to annoying stuff at work and good stuff personally, I didn't have time to grind out my usual bit of Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, today. Fortunately, there is a long history on this blog, full of good stuff that I can repost. So, as I did when I went to TAM7, I'm picking a couple of posts for today that originally appeared in August. This one happens to have first appeared in August 2006; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you (and if you have, I hope you enjoy it a second time).
I'll be back tomorrow.
Via Pure Pedantry, I've become…
oracknows | August 3, 2009Due to annoying stuff at work and good stuff personally, I didn't have time to grind out my usual bit of Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, today. Fortunately, there is a long history on this blog, full of good stuff that I can repost. So, as I did when I went to TAM7, I'm picking a couple of posts for today that originally appeared in August. This one happens to have first appeared in August 2006; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you (and if you have, I hope you enjoy it a second time).
I'll be back tomorrow.
I debated for a while about whether…
oracknows | August 2, 2009Due to annoying stuff at work and good stuff personally, I didn't have time to grind out my usual bit of Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, today. Fortunately, there is a long history on this blog, full of good stuff that I can repost. So, as I did when I went to TAM7, I'm picking a couple of posts for today that originally appeared in August. This one happens to have first appeared in August 2006; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you (and if you have, I hope you enjoy it a second time).
I'll be back tomorrow.
So, after nearly two weeks of…
oracknows | August 1, 2009...that my parents tied the knot.
All I can say on such an occasion is that my parents, though their example, have taught me what marriage can be at its best. This evening a few dozen of our closest family and friends will gather together to pay tribute and celebrate 50 amazing years together. There will even be a video tribute. (And, no, it won't be posted on YouTube.)
Happy 50th Anniversary, Mom and Dad. I'll be seeing you later today.
oracknows | July 31, 2009You may remember a couple of months ago, I took Dr. Bob Sears to task. Dr. Bob, as you may recall, wrote a book that has become the bane of pediatricians everywhere, namely The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child. In this book, Dr. Bob, while oh-so-piously proclaiming that he is "not anti-vaccine," lays down in his discussion of childhood vaccines a credulous treatment of many anti-vaccine canards in a sort of "I don't believe vaccines cause autism, but..." sort of fashion. When last we saw him on this blog, Dr. Sears had decided to let his anti-vaccine freak flag high and…
oracknows | July 31, 2009One of the advantages of having been a blogger for nearly five years is that you gain a sense of perspective after having written about various issues over and over for a long time. True, the disadvantage is that it sometimes becomes difficult to think of something new to say about longstanding issues. Even so, it's still quite useful, every so often, to take a look back over a longstanding issue of interest to the blog (more like a festering sore that keeps getting worse), and a new article in Salon.com gives me a perfect excuse to do just that. The topic has been a frequent topic on this…
oracknows | July 30, 2009It's that time yet again, time for another meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. This time around, Beyond the Short Coat hosts a nightmare. No, really, a nightmare. Remember Mitchell and Web's vision of what a Homeopathic A & E would look like? The 116th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle goes way, way beyond that. Here's hoping I don't get injured or sick or injured any time soon.
Next up is Ionian Enchantment on August 13. Help purge this horrific vision of the future of medicine by lining up posts now.
oracknows | July 30, 2009The last couple of nights, I guess, have proven that Orac is not quite as durable as his namesake. Having been up nearly all night working against a deadline for my Komen Foundation grant application and only gotten a couple of hours of sleep each of the last couple of nights, this morning, I've got nothing. I overslept by over an hour and came flying into work all late and discombobulated. (Fear not. Thursday is not my O.R. day. My patients are safe.)
So what does a blogger do in this circumstance, when he's all tired and has zero time to produce a substantive post? What else? Open thread!…
oracknows | July 29, 2009I realize this is well over a month old, and maybe some of you have seen it before, but I haven't. It's a fascinating look by surgeon and inventor Catherine Mohr at the history of surgery and how it has evolved over the centuries.
One thing that talks like this remind me is just how much surgery has evolved just in the short span of my career thus far, since I went to medical school in the mid-1980s. Indeed, I undertook my surgical training right in the middle of the laparoscopic revolution and experienced some of the disconnect that older surgeons must have experienced. You see, I went…
oracknows | July 29, 2009A while back, I wrote about the grievous miscarriage of justice that occurred to Simon Singh in the form of a ruling against him in the libel suit brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association. Suffice it to say, that the BCA is using the U.K.'s exceedingly plaintiff-friendly libel laws to silence legitimate criticism of the dubious practices of its members. This resulted in a campaign from the British pro-science organization Sense About Science to Keep Libel Laws Out of Science.
Now, I learn that, true to Internet tradition, the attempt to suppress information or punish…
oracknows | July 28, 2009You may have heard of the lunatic fringe contingent that thinks that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and thus not eligible to be President of the United States according to the Constitution. They're incredible cranks, cooking up all manner of dire conspiracy theories about a doctored birth certificate and birth documents, all full of dark plotting, aided and abetted, of course, by the "liberal" press. They're very much like 9/11 Truthers, only not as coherent. (And, no, that's not a compliment to 9/11 Truthers, either.)
That there are kooky conspiracy theorists…
oracknows | July 28, 2009In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall (a.k.a. The SkepDoc) likes to call "tooth fairy science," where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I've often taken Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) to task. That's because Senator Harkin is undeniably the father of that misbegotten beast that has sucked down over $2.5 billion of taxpayer money with nothing to show for it. It's…