oracknows | May 28, 2009Here's one of the stranger "alternative cancer cure" cases I've seen in a while. Basically, a man seems to think that a daily helping of his daughter's breast milk will cure his metastatic colon cancer:
When Tim Browne sits down to a bowl of corn flakes in the morning, he slurps up one unusual, and controversial, extra ingredient: his own daughter's breast milk.
He doesn't do it for the taste -- Browne initally said his daughter Georgia's breast millk tasted "not unpleasant, but slightly pungent" -- but for his health.
Nearly two years ago, the retired teacher and musician from Wiltshire,…
oracknows | May 28, 2009Today is a very good day indeed.
I say that because Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who ran away with his mother to avoid having to undergo chemotherapy ordered by a judge, who had found that his parents were engaging in medical neglect in not getting him effective treatment, and returned on Monday, will begin his course of chemotherapy today. I'm very happy to hear that Daniel and his parents have decided to stop fighting:
After Daniel and his mother returned to Minnesota this week, both his parents told a judge they will let Daniel undergo chemotherapy because…
oracknows | May 27, 2009I'm a bit envious of Dawn Crawford. Why am I envious? She has a badge of honor I have yet to obtain.
Jenny McCarthy has blocked her on Twitter.
Darn. I'm going to have to see if I can get Jenny to block me too.
oracknows | May 26, 2009Hot on the heels of yesterday's paper in Pediatrics showing that vaccine refusal elevates the risk of pertussis in a child by nearly 23-fold, a commentary in PLoS Biology asks what can be done to combat anti-vaccine misinformation. Entitled A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars, it's an interview with a professor of medical anthropology at UCSF named Sharon Kaufman, who took a 26 month hiatus from her usual work on aging and longevity to study the anti-vaccine movement from an anthropological perspective. Her observations in some way echo observations I've been making as a…
oracknows | May 26, 2009One of the claims of the anti-vaccine movement that most irks me is that their actions do not risk harm to anyone other than their own unvaccinated children. Given that vaccination against many infectious diseases also depends on the concept of herd immunity to provide protection to members of the population who either cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, are too young to be vaccinated, or who belong to the minority who do not develop adequate immunity to vaccination, such claims are patently false. However, another frequently stated belief is that vaccines are ineffective, that they are…
oracknows | May 25, 2009I've been writing a lot about the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who underwent one course of chemotherapy and then decided he wanted to pursue "alternative therapy" based on fear of chemotherapy and the faux Native American religion that his mother had taken up with. Ultimately, after a judge ordered Daniel's parents to make sure that Daniel received the chemotherapy and radiation therapy he needed, Daniel and his mother Colleen went on the lam last week and were last thought to be heading for Mexico and almost certain death.
That is, until sanity prevailed…
oracknows | May 25, 2009It's a lovely, sunny day here, so I'll be brief. I've written several posts about the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old who refused chemotherapy and is now on the run from the law with his mother to avoid having to comply with a judge's order that he receive effective, science-based treatment. One strange aspect of this story is that he may be receiving aid from Billy Best, a man who, as a teen, also had Hodgkin's disease and, at age 16, also ran away to avoid chemotherapy.
Here's the story headline:
Man Who Survived Without Chemo: 'I'd Still Fight': Man Who Ran to Avoid Chemo in 1994,…
oracknows | May 24, 2009On Thursday and Friday, the Chicago Tribune ran a two part series (part 1 and part 2) about what is arguably one of the worst atrocities (I agree with Steve Novella on this one) committed against autistic children in the name of antivaccine lunacy. Specifically, these articles discussed Mark and David Geier's Lupron protocol, which I blogged about three years ago, and Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, the founder of the woo-friendly Homefirst medical practice in suburban Chicago, whom I've also blogged about in the past.
Surprisingly, the reaction from the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism has…
oracknows | May 23, 2009About a year ago in Wisconsin, an 11-year-old girl named Madeleine Neumann died of diabetic ketoacidosis thanks of the irrational religious beliefs of her parents, who prayed for her but did not take her to a physician even as Madeleine became weaker and more ill, her deterioration leading to a most unpleasant death. Highly unusual in such cases, the DA actually prosecuted the parents for second-degree reckless homicide. Given the unjustifiably privileged position irrational religious justifications for doing horrible things have in our society, I was even more shocked that this case went to…
oracknows | May 22, 2009As promised, the Chicago Tribune served up the followup article to its expose of father-and-son autism quacks Mark and David Geier. This time around, the Trib takes on Dr. Mayer Eisenstein of the woo-friendly suburban Chicago medical practice known as Homefirst in two articles, Autism doctor: Troubling record trails doctor treating autism and Dr. Peter Rosi places blame on some parents for their babies' deaths (Dr. Rosi is one of Homefirst's longest-serving doctors). The reason Dr. Eisenstein came to the Trib's attention is because (1) he has started using the Geiers' Lupron protocol and (2)…
oracknows | May 22, 2009I originally joined this wild and woolly collective known as ScienceBlogs back in February 2006. I was not part of the very first wave of bloggers who made up ScienceBlogs when it launched, although I potentially could have, mainly because I had to work out policies about outside employment with my university before I could join up. In any case, one of the very first posts that I did back then that made a bit of a splash was a little ditty I called in my usual inimitable and restrained fashion, Why not just castrate them?
It was the dark saga of an even darker father-and-son tag team of…
oracknows | May 21, 2009Time flies, and the ShamWow guy shows up...
And so does the 111th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, this time at hosted at Action Skeptics. You'll never look at the ShamWow guy in the same way again.
Next up is Cheshire, who will be hosting two weeks hence on June 4. This blog has never hosted before, and we always love to bring new blood to the Circle. So get your best skeptical work ready. You have less than two weeks.
oracknows | May 21, 2009I know I've been very, very harsh on Jenny McCarthy. After all, she has become the face of the anti-vaccine movement in America, and her activities are directly endangering children. Let's take a look back, oh, a few days to a video that she made in which she decried all manner of "toxins" in vaccines as the cause of autism, including aluminum (which is not toxic at the doses used in vaccines), mercury (which is no longer in most childhood vaccines other than in trace amounts), antifreeze (there is no antifreeze in vaccines), and ether (again, there is no ether in vaccines). Then look back a…
oracknows | May 20, 2009Over the last couple of weeks, I've been blogging regularly about the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with stage 2B Hodgkin's lymphoma who, after one course of chemotherapy in January, refused to undergo any more, citing a faux religion run by a woo-meister naturopath and Native American wannabe called "Chief" Cloudpiler. In reality, it probably wasn't so much belief in this fake religion, which is really no more than an excuse to use laws guaranteeing Native Americans freedom to practice their religions as justification for using peyote and various quackery for disease, but rather…
oracknows | May 20, 2009I know I've been writing a lot about the Daniel Hauser case, and forgive me if I may be beating a dead horse, but cases like these reprsent supreme "teachable" moments that don't come along that often. The antivaccine movement, for instance, will be with us always (or at least, I fear, as long as I still walk this earth and beyond), but cases like that of Daniel Hauser don't come along that often. As tragic as they are, they always bring up so many issues that I have a hard time leaving them alone.
This time around, I wanted to touch on an issue that has come up frequently in the discussions…
oracknows | May 19, 2009Maybe I was wrong.
I praised the decision of Judge Rodenberg last Friday, in which he placed chemotherapy refusenik Daniel Hauser in the custody of his parents and ordered them to take him to an oncologist and have him undergo repeat staging studies in order to determine the extent of his Hodgkin's lymphoma. I did mention my one reservation was that leaving Daniel in the custody of his mother did run the risk of their fleeing to avoid the court order. Unfortunately, shades of Katie Wernecke, that's exactly what they appear to have done:
Daniel Hauser and his parents, Colleen and Anthony…
oracknows | May 19, 2009A reader informs me of a plaintive, heartfelt request from Oprah for help in developing the television show of her new protege Jenny McCarthy:
You've seen it all over the news...Jenny McCarthy, one of America's funniest and coolest moms and Harpo is giving her, her own show.
Here is where YOU come in.
What would you like to see featured on Jenny's show? What would you like for her to talk about? What are you and your friends buzzing about?
Any topics you'd like for her to tackle? Are there any questions that you have -- that you would love for her to answer?
If so -- we definitely want to…
oracknows | May 19, 2009As you may have noticed if you've been paying attention to the comments over the last few days, you may have noticed that we've had a bit of an infiltration of believers in "alternative cancer cures" (or, as I will abbreviate them, ACCs). The main focus of the infiltration appears to be in this post about Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy who refused chemotherapy for his Hodgkin's lymphoma and whose case was recently decided, with the judge ordering his parents to obtain repeat staging studies and then to get him to a science-based practitioner in order to get appropriate therapy. Oddly…
oracknows | May 18, 2009Time marches on, flies, or does whatever it is that time does, and, before I know it, two weeks have passed, and you know what that means. That's right, the next meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is only three days away.
This time around it's going to be hosted at Action Skeptics. Blog-specific instructions for submitting your work can be found here. General instructions for submitting your work can be found here. So get cracking! There's still time!
Finally, as usual, I'm always on the lookout for intrepid skeptical bloggers to host their very own meetings of the Skeptics' Circle. Take a look…
oracknows | May 18, 2009You knew it was just a matter of time. At least I did. Let me back up a minute and tell you what I mean.
Over the last week, I've done three posts about a chemotherapy refusenik (as some oncologists I've worked with tend to refer to them as) named Daniel Hauser. Hauser is a 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who, after having undergone one course of chemotherapy for his disease, decided that he didn't want anymore. He and his mother justified his refusal using the teachings of a faux Native American cultish religious group but in reality are probably only using religion as a convenient…