oracknows | July 4, 2009Last week, I wrote about how Senator Tom Harkin is up to his old shenanigans again, trying at ever turn to do for the actual practice of quackery what he did for the research of quackery by creating the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and what he still does to promote quackery by berating NCCAM for in essence being too scientific in not having validated enough of his cherished woo. In essence, Harkin has slipped a provision into the Senate version of the 600+ page health care reform bill that is currently taking shape in Congress that included funding for "…
oracknows | July 4, 2009While I"m on a Mitchell and Webb kick and it's still a slow blogging holiday weekend, this isn't about homeopathy but it does skewer a certain profession:
You know, I can sort of picture Dr. Michael Egnor (a younger version, of course) being the brain surgeon in this sketch...
oracknows | July 3, 2009I love Mitchell and Webb, and this is just one reason why. They totally get homeopathy, as this video e-mailed to me by a reader demonstrates:
Pay close attention to the signs in the A & E. Too bad this is too late for Homeopathy Awareness Week.
And they're funny, to boot. While I'm on the subject of homeopathy, I know I've posted it before, but it's never wrong to repost an oldie but goody, the classic Homeopathic E.R.:
Here in the States, it's one of those rare long holiday weekends spanning Friday through Sunday instead of the usual Saturday through Monday. Because I'm working on a…
oracknows | July 2, 2009I may be a little late to the party, but that's because my laptop happens to have ad blocking software installed. However, blog bud PalMD rubbed my nose into a little kerfuffle that's been going on here the last couple of days. Basically, some really, really bad advertisements have been popping up. Ads for quackery like this popped up:
Lovely. Here I am pointing out why the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy is an unethical boondoggle of a quackfest, full of violations of the most basic protections for human subjects, and what's appearing above my post?
Ads for chelation therapy! And I…
oracknows | July 2, 2009Well it's here, just in time for the Fourth of July weekend holiday, a brand spanking new Skeptics' Circle. Given how many of our Founding Fathers were freethinkers, I like to think now is a perfect time for a shot of skeptical blogging. And our host this week has just the thing: On the Tendency of Skeptics to form Circles; and on the Perpetuation of Circles and Skeptics by Natural Means of Selection. Be sure to check it out.
Next up in two weeks is Effort Sisyphus. Be sure to start firing up your keyboards to provide the raw material, namely great skeptical blogging, to make next week's…
oracknows | July 2, 2009Last year, a seeming victory for the protection of human subjects from being subjected to pseudoscience. It began when Kimball C. Atwood IV, MD; Elizabeth Woeckner, AB, MA; Robert S. Baratz, MD, DDS, PhD; and Wallace I. Sampson, MD published a lengthy criticism of the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) in Medscape, pointing out that it was a boondoggle that was not only not based on sound science but was in fact risky to patients and riddled with conflicts of interest and administered by highly dubious practitioners. If you want to know just how bad the National Center for…
oracknows | July 1, 2009Earlier this year, I wrote about Senator Tom Harkin's attempt to hijack President Obama's health care reform plans in order to inject quackery in the form of "alternative" or "integrative" medicine into the effort. Specifically, he wants to legitimize quackery by including it in any federal plan under the guise of "preventative care." He even went so far as to invite the Four Horsement of the Woopocalypse into the Senate to testify and castigate the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine for being too scientific and not proving that any of his favored woo works. Of course…
oracknows | July 1, 2009Remember Sharyl Attkisson?
She's the CBS reporter who can really bring home the crazy when it comes to vaccines and autism, laying down some serious crankery (complete with many logical fallacies) and hit pieces on Dr. Paul Offit. Indeed, at times she gives Mike Adams a run for his money when it comes to laying down the pseudoscience and crankery. Worse, she appears to be in bed with at least one of the bloggers at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism for the purpose of bringing antivaccination lunacy to the masses by assisting them in smearing Voices for Vaccines. Indeed, aside from…
oracknows | June 30, 2009I waited.
I knew it was coming. It had to. History was on my side. My quarry was nutty, but in a way exceedingly predictable. it wasn't so much that I knew exactly what he would do. He wasn't predictable in that way. It was that I knew he would do something crazy. Actually, on second thought, I did know what he was going to do. I had only to consider how ghoulishly he treated Tony Snow and Bernie Mac, and Tim Russert and how he leapt at the opportunity to abuse Christina Applegate. To him, when a dying celebrity like Patrick Swayze rejected quackery, it was more than he could stand. Whenever…
oracknows | June 29, 2009On Friday, I posted a plea for donations to the JREF effort to help poor families vaccinate their children against childhood diseases.
Over the weekend DuWayne Brayton did me one better with his plea:
I have been where a lot of those families are. While $25 may not seem like a hell of a lot to most people, when you are to the point where you have to ration your eating to five or six meals a week, to ensure your children get enough to eat, that works out to being a lot of meals you will miss that month. And I can also attest, trying to functionally work when you're only eating one meal, ever…
oracknows | June 29, 2009This is just a brief followup to my post this morning about yesterday's NYT article on cancer research. An excellent discussion of the NYT article can be found here (and is well worth reading in its entirety). In it, Jim Hu did something I should have done, namely check the CRISP database in addition to PubMed. A couple of key points follow about the examples cited in the NYT article.
Regarding Dennis Slamon:
I hate to criticize Dennis Slamon, because the HER2 to Herceptin story is a great one. But the image one gets of his research program being saved by a friend from Revlon while the NCI…
oracknows | June 29, 2009A couple of weeks ago, NEWSWEEK science columnist Sharon Begley wrote an article entitled From Bench To Bedside: Academia slows the search for cures. It was a rather poorly argued bit of polemic, backed up only with anecdotes that came across as sour grapes by scientists whose grant proposals the NIH had decided not to fund, and based on many misconceptions she had regarding basic science versus translational research, journal impact factors, and how journals actually determine what they will publish. Not suprisingly, Begley's article caught flak from others, including Mike the Mad Biologist…
oracknows | June 27, 2009If you had the choice between the "standard" option for insurance or the naturopathic option, which would you choose?
(Click to see the full cartoon; it's a bit old. But I hadn't seen it before; so it's new to me.)
Of course, this is the very reason alt-med boosters don't want anyone to have to choose. They want to "integrate" their quackery into scientific medicine.
oracknows | June 26, 2009If there's one thing that I've found that's simultaneously gratifying and somewhat infuriating over the last year or so, it's that the skeptical movement has finally really noticed that anti-vaccination movement in a big way. Those of us who've been on the blogospheric front lines for the last few years have sometimes been frustrated that this issue, at least until recently, got so little attention outside of our dedicated little circle and the much larger circle of anti-vaccine zealots and the quacks who enable and encourage them.
That's not to say that there weren't some prominent skeptics…
oracknows | June 26, 2009I have a love-hate relationship with Mike Adams.
Mike Adams, regular readers of this blog, is the "intellectual force" between that repository of quackery and sheer lunacy, NaturalNews.com. I hate him because he is a vile human being who cheerfully promotes bogus therapies on his website. (You know, I think we skeptics should borrow Simon Singh's phraseology at every opportunity.) He's also an opportunistic ghoul who never, ever misses an opportunity to take advantage of a celebrity who's suffering from or dying of cancer to make breathlessly hysterical claims that they would have lived if…
oracknows | June 25, 2009Unfortunately, I saw this coming, although I had thought that it might be a few more months. Farrah Fawcett has lost her three year battle with anal cancer:
Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and bewitched a generation of men, beginning with a celebrated pinup poster, died Thursday morning in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 62 and lived in West Los Angeles.
Her death, at St. John's Health Center, was caused by anal cancer, which she had been battling since 2006, said her spokesman, Paul Bloch.
To an…
oracknows | June 25, 2009Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the reason for Apple CEO Steve Job's five month medical leave of absence from Apple is that he needed a liver transplant, which, according to the story, he underwent a couple of months ago in Memphis. In my discussion, I assumed, for the most part, the most likely clinical scenario, namely that Steve Jobs' insulinoma had metastasized to his liver and that the liver transplant had been done for that indication, but, as some pointed out, it was possible that Jobs had somehow fried his liver without his tumor having metastasized. Unlikely,…
oracknows | June 24, 2009The other day, I came across an update on the Daniel Hauser saga. Specifically, I commented about how he is not only undergoing the chemotherapy ordered by his doctors. As you may recall, Hauser is a 13-year-old boy who, after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and undergoing one round of chemotherapy, refused to undergo any more. His mother supported him, and ultimately a judge had to order Daniel's parents to make sure that he underwent standard therapy for his very curable form of cancer. Daniel's mother Colleen took off with him shortly afterward, rumored to be heading for Tijuana.…
oracknows | June 24, 2009At the risk of repeating myself (but, then, since when did such concerns ever stop me before?), I'll just start out by mentioning that, of all the non-herbal "alternative" medicine remedies out there, I used to give a bit of a pass to acupuncture. No, I never did buy any of that nonsense about how sticking thin needles into the skin at points along various "meridians" somehow "redirects the flow of qi," that mystical life force upon which so much woo, particularly woo based on Eastern mysticism and traditional Chinese medicine depends. However, because acupuncture involves an actual physical…
oracknows | June 23, 2009Last week, I wrote about the FDA's warning about the zinc-containing "homeopathic" cold remedy known as Zicam. Basically, Zicam was approved without testing to show it to be both safe and efficacious because it slipped in using an old 1938 law that allows homeopathic remedies to bypass the usual process for FDA approval. Too bad that, due to the zinc in Zicam, it can cause anosmia, or the loss of the sense of smell.
Stephen Colbert, of course, thinks it must be the Democrats who are plotting against one of Rush Limbaugh's main sponsors:
The Colbert Report
Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c…