oracknows | May 16, 2009Over the last week, I've written about the case of a 13-year-old chemotherapy refusenik named Daniel Hauser, who lives in Minnesota. After having been diagnosed with a highly curable form of cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, back in February and having undergone one cycle of chemotherapy that apparently made him very sick, he refused further chemotherapy and his mother actually went to court to justify this decision. As part of their justification, they tried to use freedom of religion based on Daniel's supposedly being a "medicine man" in a cult of faux Native American wannabes called Nemenhah,…
oracknows | May 15, 2009About a week ago, I lamented an astoundingly bad ruling in the libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against skeptic Simon Singh. The ruling was so bad that many observers are wondering whether it's possible for Singh to go on or whether he can afford to appeal. Blogger Jack of Kent, who has been following the case with astute obsevations, tells us:
I understand that Simon Singh will announce whether he will appeal on Monday 18 May 2009 at a public support meeting to take place in London at 6.30pm.
The venue will be the Penderels Oak, the usual meeting place of London…
oracknows | May 15, 2009
While I'm on the topic, blog bud has proclaimed that he loves Jenny McCarthy's new blog at the Oprah website, in particular her Poop Stories. Personally, when I first saw Jenny's blog, my first thought was that a question I had always had ever since Jenny McCarthy became the chief propagandist for the antivaccine movement had finally been answered. I now know why that cesspit of anti-vaccine lunacy, The Huffington Post, had never invited Jenny McCarthy to blog. HuffPo may not have standards when it comes to science, but at least it has standards when it comes to writing, and Jenny's…
oracknows | May 14, 2009A loving ode to Jenny McCarthy from her good friends, Measles, Mumps, and Rubella:
Genius. That's all I can say.Thank you Brian Thompson, a.k.a. the Amateur Scientist. And to you, Jenny McCarthy, the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella offer their profound thanks for saving them from eradication in the U.S., just as they've offered their thanks to Andrew Wakefield for saving them from eradication in the U.K..Bloggers, you know what to do. Spread this video far and wide. E-mail it to your friends. Even better, e-mail it to antivaccinationists. Let's see if we can make this sucker go viral. (Hey,…
oracknows | May 14, 2009I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism.
The reason for the hate part should be obvious. AoA is, without a doubt, a cesspool of pseudoscience and anti-vaccine propaganda. All while oh-so-self-righteously denying that its agenda is "anti-vaccine," AoA on a daily basis lays down articles blaming vaccines for autism, while setting up websites attacking vaccine science, taking out full page ads attacking vaccines as causing autism, gloating when learning of declining vaccination rates in the Ukraine, and high-fiving (blogospherically speaking)…
oracknows | May 13, 2009I have to hand it to acupuncture mavens. They are persistent. Despite numerous studies failing to find any evidence that acupuncture is anything more than an elaborate placebo whose effects, such as they are, derive from nonspecifice mechanisms having nothing to do with meridians, qi, or "unblocking" qi. Moreover, consistent with the contention that acupuncture is no more than an elaborate placebo, various forms of "sham" acupuncture (needles that appear to insert but don't or acupuncture in the "wrong" locations, for example) produce results indistinguishable from "real" acupuncture.
That…
oracknows | May 12, 2009I like the way some people think, Clive Davis, for instance.
Remember how, two or three weeks ago, I speculated about who would play arch-Holocaust denier David Irving in a movie that's been optioned based on his libel suit against Holocaust historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt? Well, Clive Davis has a better idea:
Cinematical suggests Emma Thompson should portray Lipstadt. As for the other lead role, I'm tempted to go for Denzel Washington, just to give the world's most famous Holocaust denier another reason to go to court.
Heh. I'd love to see that. Of course, if we want to match viewpoints…
oracknows | May 12, 2009Yesterday, I wrote about Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who, with the support of his parents, has refused conventional therapy for his cancer, which would normally consist of chemotherapy and radiation. Given his stage and type of tumor, he could normally expect at least an 85% chance of surviving and perhaps even greater than 90%, wherea without therapy he is certain to die of his disease, barring a rare spontaneous remission. The reason given by his Daniel and his mother Colleen is that they belong to a highly dubious-sounding American Indian religion called…
oracknows | May 11, 2009Remember about a week ago, when I lamented how scientific publisher Elsevier had created a fake journal for Merck that reprinted content from other Elsevier journals favorable to Merck products in a format that looked every bit like a peer-reviewed journal but without any disclaimers to let the unwary know that it wasn't a peer-reviewed journal?
Whoops, Elsevier did it again. Six times:
Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did…
oracknows | May 10, 2009Regular readers here know that I really hate to see stories like the one I'm about to discuss, specifically that of 13-year-old Daniel Hauser, a boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who is refusing chemotherapy based on religion and his preference for "alternative" therapy, whose parents are also supporting his decision.
Since I'm a bit behind on this story, its having percolated through the blogosphere for the last three or four days, let me start with a bit of context. If there is one theme that I've emphasized time and time again here, it's science- and evidence-based medicine. That means…
oracknows | May 9, 2009...because they blog under the shadow of the United Kingdom's insane libel laws.
Witness this travesty of a ruling on the libel case against Simon Singh by the British Chiropractic Association, as related by Jack of Kent.
I first learned about the UK's exceedingly plaintiff-friendly libel laws when, shortly after I became interested in Holocaust denial, I followed the libel case against Holocaust historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt brought by Holocaust denier David Irving for, well, quite properly calling him a Holocaust denier in one of her books. What makes British libel laws so plaintiff-…
oracknows | May 8, 2009I know, I know it seems like the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel, but some creature that I can't identify is having a fight somewhere in the neighborhood, freaking out my dog, and now I can't go back to sleep; so why not blog? In any case, I found out last week that Jenny McCarthy is on Twitter as JennyfromMTV.
Now, when I first saw it, I thought it had to be a spoof, someone pretending to be Jenny. No one could be as inane as to Tweet things like:
Im inside a hyperbaric chamber. This thing makes me feel amazing.
About to fly to jersey. Security stole my sugar free jelly out of my purse…
oracknows | May 8, 2009After having blogged about cancer quackery for more than four years and having spent at least five years before that on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative seeing virtually all manner of quackery, cancer and otherwise, I thought I had seen it all. Indeed, I thought that there was no form of cancer quackery that I hadn't head about at some point before.
I was wrong.
Perusing the Skepchick blog the other day I saw a wonderful story related by Masala Skeptic about how a group of skeptics in Mississippi attended a talk by a cancer quack named Robert Dowling, who apparently claims that…
oracknows | May 7, 2009As you may recall, the last meeting of the Skeptics' Circle never came to pass due to the illness of the host. That was to be the 110th Skeptics' Circle. Given that I had somehow screwed up and used the same number twice, though, it all works out if I simply label this Skeptics' Circle the 110th.
And a fine edition it is, hosted as it is by Corey, our youngest host thus far. So, check out the 110th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: The Calvinball Edition.
Next up to host will be Action Skeptics on May 21. Get your best skeptical blogging ready!
oracknows | May 7, 2009Unfortunately, Orac has been feeling a bit under the weather since last night--so much so that he actually did something he rarely does and stayed home from work.
But enough with the third person schtick. If I feel better later, maybe I'll post something. Hopefully I'll be back to 100% tonight and can produce the usual Insolence that readers know and expect for tomorrow. Right now I can't say. What I can say, however, that, whatever I post, at least today it won't be about Jenny McCarthy's and J.B. Handley's appearance on The Doctors yesterday. My gastrointestinal status is tenuous enough as…
oracknows | May 6, 2009If there's one thing about the anti-vaccine movement in general and one of its chief mouthpieces for propaganda, the Age of Autism blog, in particular, it's rank hypocrisy. One of the key tenets of anti-vaccine ideology is an unrelenting distrust of big pharma. While that in and of itself would not be entirely unreasonable, given the documented chicanery of that large pharmaceutical companies have indulged in from time to time, but on AoA the crew takes such mistrust beyond reasonable skepticism and straight into tinfoil hat territory. Indeed, "pharma shill!" is one of their favorite cries…
oracknows | May 6, 2009A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed this tendency long before I saw Mark's post, including one Dr. Lorraine Day, who, besides being a purveyor of quackery, is also a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who had treated arch-Holocaust Ernst Zündel with "alternative" therapies when he was in jail awaiting trial, and a conspiracy theorist…
oracknows | May 5, 2009Pinch me. I must be dreaming.
I say that because I actually see an article in The Huffington Post in which the blogger, Jacob Dickerman, actually correctly describes why homeopathy is quackery! For instance:
Homeopaths will tell us that water has a memory. That it vibrates in a certain way and thus knows exactly what the homeopath put into it. The thing is, if Hahnemann is somehow right about homeopathy, then it doesn't only fly in the face of all those sciences I listed above (physiology, physics, chemistry, germ theory, hydro-dynamics), it flies in the face of public safety. Because the…
oracknows | May 5, 2009Homeopathy is water.
Homeopaths will tell you otherwise. They will tell you that water "memory," which, the way they describe it is some mystical property whereby it "remembers" the remedy with which it's been in contact, even though the substance (whatever it was) has been diluted far beyond the point where there's likely to be even one molecule of it left. Not only that, but they will, in all seriousness, tell you that dilution is not enough. They will insist that, at each serial dilution, the remedy must be vigorously shaken (or, as they call it, "succussed") in order to imbue it with its…
oracknows | May 4, 2009...comes, from of all places, Gawker:
Oh, good, Oprah is going to give Jenny McCarthy a talk show, because she wants your kid to die of the measles.
McCarthy, a famous celebrity from the long-defunct Playboy magazine and much missed MTV channel, has been on a crusade to find an evildoer responsible for her son's autism. She settled on vaccines, because why not. And now she spends a great deal of time on TV explaining that the mercury that has not been vaccines since 1999 is giving all the kids autism, but it can be cured with Chelation therapy, which has so far only killed one or two autistic…