oracknows | June 10, 2009"Empowerment."
What a grand word! After all, who doesn't want to be "empowered"? Certainly not me. Perhaps that's the reason why it's become the new buzzword in a movement known as "patient-centered" care. Old fart that I am, I'm a bit puzzled by exactly what that term means. After all, I've always thought I have been practicing patient-centered care, ever since my first days in medical school, but apparently these days it means something different, at least if this article from a few days ago in the New York Times is any indication. It's an interview with Dr. Donald Berwick, who advocates…
oracknows | June 9, 2009Yesterday, I marveled at an article that appeared on the Associated Press new feed that basically said a lot of things about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers, how so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" 9CAM) is finding its way into the mainstream despite almost nonexistent evidence for the efficacy the vast majority of them, and how supplements are virtually unregulated. If the article had mentioned the extreme scientific and biological implausibility of nearly all of the non-herbal CAM therapies that are routinely promoted, it would have…
oracknows | June 8, 2009Vaccines have saved more lives and prevented more suffering than any medical invention ever conceived by humans. However, to be most effective, a large enough fraction of the population to produce herd immunity needs to be immunized. When the herd immunity threshold is reached, then the chances of anyone carrying a microorganism to cause disease drops, leaving no reservoir of infectious agent to facilitate disease spread. The end result is that the unvaccinated are also protected, which is important for children who can't be vaccinated because they are either too young, have a medical…
oracknows | June 8, 2009Here we go again.
As regular readers know, I've lamented long and loud the infiltration of unscientific "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM, or what Dr. RW dubbed "quackademic medicine, a term I very much like) into medical school curricula, academic medical centers, and postgraduate medical education. A while back, in particular, I got rather worked up over how the University of Maryland's respected Shock Trauma Center. But it wasn't just any woo. Rather, it was one of the absolute woo-iest of woos, namely reiki, which is nothing more than magical faith healing based on Eastern…
oracknows | June 7, 2009I'm busy working on a talk today, but there is a tidbit that lends itself to a brief (and hopefully amusing and educational) Sunday exercise. It comes, not surprisingly, from the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism. It doesn't actually have anything to do with vaccines per se, but it is a perfect encapsulation of the sort of fallacious statements and arguments that pseudoscientists in general make. Indeed, this comment could easily have come from a creationist, religious, alternative medicine, New Age, or 9/11 Truther website, among others and fit right in.
Specifically, it is a comment that the…
oracknows | June 6, 2009Dr. Jay is back.
You remember Dr. Jay (namely Dr. Jay "I'm not anti-vaccine but I give vaccines only 'reluctantly' and am convinced that they cause autism" Gordon), pediatrician to Evan, Jenny McCarthy's son and frequent apologist for the antivaccine movement in the media. Specifically, he was most unhappy over my posts about Dr. Bob "too many too soon" Sears and about a child who died of Hib. If you peruse the comments in those two posts, you will see him once again disparaging science, touting his own personal clinical experience over the science failing to find a link between vaccines and…
oracknows | June 5, 2009SETTING: A NONDESCRIPT CLINIC IN AUSTIN, TEXAS
TIME: AFTER DARK
It had been a long, hard day at the clinic. The man trudged to the back of the building and plopped himself down on a large, cushy leather office chair, causing it to spin around. He was fiftyish, but still boyish in appearance, possessed of a seemingly unflappable self-confidence. Even so, he was not happy.
Damn, I hate being here. He thought. I'd much rather be back in London than stuck in this hick state. At least Austin is about as good as it gets here. I suppose it could be worse; I could be in Arkansas.
He sighed. "Damn…
oracknows | June 4, 2009Skeptics, unfortunately, have an image problem. The woo-loving crowd thinks we're all stodgy and buzz-killing, but we like to party just as much as anyone else. Indeed, the latest Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is proof positive, as our host Cheshire hosts a Skeptic Party.
Next up is the Unincredible Hallq, who, I hope, will be back from his blog break by June 18, which is when the the next Circle will appear once again.
oracknows | June 4, 2009
Back in May many of us in the skeptical blogosphere were alarmed to learn of what British law blogger Jack of Kent termed "an astonishingly illiberal ruling" by Sir David Eady against science writer Simon Singh. Eady was the judge presiding over another bit of legal thuggery by practitioners whose feelings were hurt when Simon Singh called them out in print for their 'promotion of chiropractic to treat all sorts of conditions for which it is utterly useless, referring to the British Chiropractic Association as promoting "bogus" remedies. When I wrote about this case nearly a month ago, I…
oracknows | June 4, 2009I've warned time and time again what the price will be if the Jenny McCarthy and her fellow arrogantly ignorant band of vaccine "skeptics" continue to get more and more traction. So have many others. It is true that, for the moment, vaccination rates overall remain high in the U.S., but there are numerous troubling signs that the propaganda being spread by Generation Rescue and the anti-vaccine movement is having an effect, with outbreaks of vaccine-preventble diseases popping up in areas with high levels of "philosophical" exemptions. In such areas, vaccination rates can easily fall well…
oracknows | June 3, 2009What should a drug company do if it spends millions of dollars on a compound and it doesn't do anything? Easy:
(Click on the panel to see the whole cartoon.)
In fact, I'm surprised more pharmaceutical companies don't do this...
oracknows | June 3, 2009Yesterday, I wrote a post about what fellow ScienceBlogger Isis would term "hot, hot science." As much as I love science like that, writing such posts is a lot of work and takes considerably longer than my run-of-the-mill bit of insolent brilliance. Often, after writing an analysis of a peer-reviewed paper like that, I need a bit of a break. No, not a break in writing, but a break in difficulty. To that end, I had seen David Kirby's latest bit of disingenuous goalpost shifting over on The Huffington Post, but damn if Steve Novella didn't beat me to it. I had thought of taking sloppy seconds,…
oracknows | June 2, 2009Three years ago, I wrote about what I considered to be a fascinating and promising approach to understanding tumor biology. This method involved understanding that tumors are in general made up of a heterogeneous collection of cells. Using this knowledge, it is possible to apply evolutionary principles to cancer, treating a tumor as, in essence, an ecosystem. Indeed, that is exactly what Maley et al did three years ago. They applied evolutionary principles to the precancerous lesion in the distal esophagus known as Barrett's esophagus by examining various measures of population diversity in…
oracknows | June 1, 2009These days, I don't often participate in mass bloggings about various topics, at least not as much as I used to. I can't say if it's laziness or being jaded after having blogged on nearly a daily basis for over four years now, or an ornery tendency to want to go my own way these days. Whatever the cause, I'm making an exception today because I've been asked by Sheril Kirshenbaum, who writes:
Today begins a very important initiative called Silence Is The Enemy to help a generation of young women half a world away.Why? Because they are our sisters and children-the victims of sexual abuse who…
oracknows | June 1, 2009Last week I wrote a bit about what I've been tempted to call Oprah's War on Science but settled for the title of a documentary called The Oprah Effect. The reason, as I have mentioned before, is that arguably there is no single person who does more to promote pseudoscientific and dubious health practices than does Oprah Winfrey. I was happy to learn that more people are questioning Oprah's promotion of outright quackery than I recall ever having seen before.
It wasn't always so. Oprah Winfrey is an extremely powerful media figure, having been the host of the highest rated syndicated talk show…
oracknows | May 31, 2009Want to know how Jenny McCarthy, J.B. Handley, other anti-vaccine advocates, creationists, quacks, 9/11 Truthers, and cranks and pseudoscientists of all stripes manage to be heard when they have no science, evidence, reason, logic, or facts on their side?
Sadly, The Onion knows: Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!
At first, it looks as though the forces of reason can win:
Goddamn it, nothing's working! It's trapped us in our own unsubstantiated claims! We need to switch fundamentally unsound tactics. Hurry, throw up the straw man! Look, I think it's going for…
oracknows | May 31, 2009I've noticed that a hilariously literal-minded parody of that 1980s chestnut "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler has been making the rounds in the blogsophere. I was suitably amused, but I also found this new tidbit amusing.
I haven't seen the latest Terminator movie yet, but I've been a big fan of the Terminator movies since the very first one back in 1984. I even kind of liked Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. At least, it wasn't as bad as I had feared, and parts of it were pretty entertaining. However, what the Terminator movies have always lacked is one thing. That's right: A…
oracknows | May 30, 2009One reason I (and most people involved in cancer research) don't like the frequently used term "cure for cancer." The reason is simple. Embedded within this term is the assumption that cancer is just one disease, when it is most definitely not. Rather, it is many diseases affecting many organs, each with its own mechanism of pathogenesis and each often requiring different treatments. For example, for "liquid" tumors arising from hematopoietic organs, the treatment usually consists primarily of chemotherapy, sometimes with radiation therapy in the case of lymphomas, while "solid" tumors often…
oracknows | May 29, 2009I've been a bit remiss in not mentioning that everybody's favorite blog carnival (well, at least my favorite blog carnival), the Skeptics' Circle, is fast approaching. This time around, it'll be hosted by Cheshire, who has helpfully provided a reminder with contact information. It'll be here on Thursday, June 4, which means you have less than a week to provide some material to make this blog carnival a success. So, if you're a skeptical, science-based blogger, please be sure to make sure to send some good skeptical blogging Cheshire's way in order to make this yet another successful and…
oracknows | May 29, 2009I don't much like Oprah Winfrey.
I know, I know, it's a huge surprise to anyone who reads this blog, but there you go. Over the last four years, I've had numerous reasons to be unhappy with her, mainly because, as savvy a media celebrity and businesswoman as she is, she has about as close to no critical thinking skills when it comes to science and medicine as I've ever seen. Arguably there is no single person in the world with more influence pushing woo than Oprah. Indeed, she puts Prince Charles to shame, and Kevin Trudeau's is a mere ant compared to the juggernaught that is Oprah's media…