oracknows | April 9, 2009Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I pointed out that, in addition to its usual stable of antivaccine pseudoscience and the quantum woo of Deepak Chopra, that The Huffington Post had now delved even beyond what I thought it would by publishing the nonsensical, credulous blather about distant healing? In the post Srinivasan Pillay, self-billed certified master coach, psychiatrist, brain imaging researcher and speaker, demonstrating a profound inability to spot some very glaring shortcomings in a scientific study, actually cited Dean Radin's research as "evidence" for distant healing. Truly,…
oracknows | April 8, 2009You be the judge!
Clicking on the picture will lead you to a blog post where you can download a high resolution version suitable for printing up and either distributing or putting up on a bulletin board or wall. I particularly like that it was made by The American Institute for the Destruction of Tooth Fairy Science.
My only objection to the poster is the use of the word "shit." Don't get me wrong here. Yes, it's accurate. Yes, it's appropriate. No, I'm not some sort of prude who never uses the word and wilts at the very sight or sound of it. My problem with it is that its inclusion on the…
oracknows | April 8, 2009I really need to rein myself in sometimes.
Yesterday, all pleased as punch with myself for my mad Google skillz and for thinking I figured out just what "alternative" therapy it was that Farrah Fawcett had undergone that had resulted in what sounded for all the world like a rectus sheath hematoma, I wrote about how I thought that Fawcett had been undergoing galvanotherapy in Bad Weissee in southern Germany. Either my mad Google skillz failed me, or I was just too lazy to scroll through a sufficient number of screens to find additional information that would have brought the most likely answer…
oracknows | April 7, 2009Note the followup post to this one, in which Orac admits error. You just have to read it, given how rarely Orac messes up when speculating...
Our cancer center has a large, open area interspersed with patient waiting areas, one of which is the clinic where I see patients, that I frequently must traverse to get to the elevators that will take me to my lab. In each patient area is a large-screen television to help patients pass the time during the inevitable wait to be seen by their doctors. As I happened to be wandering through that area on the way to my lab and office, I noticed on one of…
oracknows | April 6, 2009
Embedded video from CNN Video
Over the weekend, a lot of readers sent me links to Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's appearance on Larry King Live. (If you can't stand watching the embedded video of the segment, the transcript is here.) Fortunately for me (and, I hope, you), a "friend" of mine has written a comprehensive takedown of not just the nonsense spewed by Jenny and Jim, but of a new "study" released by Generation Rescue purporting to show that nations with low numbers of mandatory vaccines have low levels of autism. Of course, it shows nothing of the sort.
Find out why at Science-…
oracknows | April 6, 2009It just never ends.
Four years ago, I was one of the very first bloggers to notice that the then-new liberal blog The Huffington Post was from its very inception a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Jay Gordon, Deirde Imus, all the luminaries of the antivaccine movement were there right from the very beginning, aided and abetted by Special Projects Editor Rachel Sklar. But HuffPo didn't limit itself to just antivaccine lunacy. Oh, no. It wasn't long before Woo-meister Supreme Deepak Chopra joined the woo crew there. About a week and a half ago, I noticed…
oracknows | April 5, 2009Sorry, all. I'm all tied up putting the finishing touches on a grant application. However, via Behind the Sofa, I did come across this trailer for the next Doctor Who special, to be aired on Easter:
I suspect I'll have to fire up BitTorrent.
oracknows | April 4, 2009One of the most common refrains from advocates of pseudoscientific and paranormal ideas is that critics are "close-minded," that they reject out of hand any idea that does not fit within their world view. Of course, this is a canard, given that science thrives on the open and free exchange of ideas, and it is not "close-mindedness" that (usually) leads to the rejection of dubious claims. Rather, it is the knowledge that, for many of such claims to be true, huge swaths of our current scientific understanding would have to be in error to such an extent that a major paradigm shift in various…
oracknows | April 3, 2009Let me say right up front that I'm not entirely sure that the victim--I mean target; no, I mean subject--of this week's little excursion into the deepest darkest depths of woo is not a parody. That's the beauty of it. I've never heard of it before, but a little Googling brought me evidence that it may not be a parody, that the guy purveying it may actually believe it. I'll leave you to judge for yourself, or, if you've heard of this guy before, to chime in and let me know the deal. I'll also point out that parts of this website are not entirely safe for work. Actually, a couple of the pages…
oracknows | April 2, 2009Time and time again, I've complained about the infiltration of woo into medical school and medical education, so much so that I've echoed Dr. R. W.'s term for it: Quackademic medicine. One tool advocates of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) use to try to "get 'em while they're young," so to speak, is to promote themselves among student groups. I've complained about the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) before, but AMSA is not the only culprit. Beware the student-run interest group in "cross-cultural and integrative medicine," especially when it hooks up with a CAM…
oracknows | April 2, 2009While I'm trying to hammer my grant application into good enough shape to show my collaborator and given that it's been nearly a year since I did this last, now seems as good a time as any to have an open thread. Say your piece.
Oh, and by the way, I see that HIV/AIDS denialists have infested Tara's brief post about Christine Maggiore. While you're waiting for more pearls of insolence from the fevered mind of Orac, you might want to give her some tactical air support.
oracknows | April 2, 2009Yesterday was long and rough, with the day spent desperately trying to finish a grant application and the evening spent in obedience training with our new dog Bailey, who, let's face it, needs more than a bit of doggie discipline. By the time I got home, had dinner, and was checking e-mail, it was pretty late and--gasp!--I didn't really feel like blogging. Yes I'm aware of that study that claims to link vinyl floors to autism that everyone's been sending me; perhaps I'll get to it tomorrow. Last night it was just too late and I was too tired to try to tackle reading a research paper and…
oracknows | April 1, 2009...but sadly, it's not. Jenny McCarthy has struck again.
Yesterday, given the release of Jenny McCarthy's new book espousing antivaccinationism and autism quackery and the attendant media blitz the antivaccine movement has organized to promote it, I predicted that a wave of stupid is about to fall upon our great nation.
Well, the stupid has landed. And how. An interview with Jenny has just been published on the TIME Magazine website in which she "surpasses" herself. In fact, so dense is the stupid emanating from what passes for a "brain" in that empty head of hers that words fail me.…
oracknows | April 1, 2009Enough.
I don't know about you, but as a surgeon and a biomedical researcher, I'm fed up with animal rights terrorists who threaten biomedical research with their misinformation about animal research, their terroristic attacks on scientists who engage in such research, and listening to the despicable self-righteous idiot who is a disgrace to surgeons everywhere, Dr. Jerry Vlasak, spouting off about how assassinating researchers who use animals as part of their research would be justified.
And apparently I'm not alone. Scientists at UCLA, which, along with UC Santa Cruz, is at ground zero for…
oracknows | March 31, 2009
Get ready for some serious stupid, folks, stupid that threatens to engulf all reason, as a black hole engulfs all nearby matter that falls into its gravitational field.
Although I knew that Jenny McCarthy was soon to release another book promoting autism quackery, I had thought it wasn't coming out for a month or two. The book is entitled Healing and Preventing Autism: A Complete Guide, written by Jenny and her partner in autism quackery Dr. Jerry Kartzinel. Dr. Kartzinel, some may recall, wrote the foreword to Jenny McCarthy's very first paean to autism quackery back in 2007 and was…
oracknows | March 31, 2009I may have been deluding myself when I talked about 2009 shaping up to be a bad year for antivaccinationists. It turns out that the antivaccine movement is succeeding.
That's right, a cadre of upper middle class, scientifically illiterate parents, either full of the arrogance of ignorance or frightened by leaders of the antivaccine movement, such as J.B. Handley, Barbara Loe Fisher, Jenny McCarthy, or the rest of the crew at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, are succeeding in endangering your children. Although the U.K. got a head start in bringing back the measles and mumps,…
oracknows | March 30, 2009Anyone who's read this blog for more than a month knows my dismal opinion of Indigo woo girl, ex-Playboy Playmate, and gross-out comedienne Jenny McCarthy, who since having a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder has transformed herself from D-list celebrity to A-list, where the "A" stands for "antivaccine." Her combination of obnoxiousness, the arrogance of ignorance, and a dogged determination to stoke the embers of the discredited idea that vaccines somehow cause autism have endangered public health in this country in the year and a half since she published her first autism book…
oracknows | March 30, 2009Indiana Jones had a saying: "Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?" This line was most famously delivered in Raiders of the Lost Ark after he and his friend Sallah had opened the Well of Souls and were staring down into it. Sallah noticed that the ground appeared to be moving within; so Indy shined a light down the entrance, only to see thousands of snakes waiting for him at the bottom.
Sallah then drily observed, "Asps. Very dangerous. You go first."
As we knew from earlier in the movie, Indiana Jones hated snakes and was afraid of them; so it was only natural that later in the movie he would…
oracknows | March 29, 2009Last week, there was a bit of a scandal of sorts over an editorial published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which I blogged about in a rather long post. The short version is that a flawed study that tested using Lexapro that neglected to report a rather important comparison that would have changed the conclusion to finding no difference between cognitive therapy and Lexapro in relieving the symptoms of depression after a stroke resulted in a complaint by Dr. Jonathan Leo of Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN. Dr. Leo wrote a letter pointing inquiring…
oracknows | March 28, 2009It's Saturday and therefore time for some lazy non-science blogging, especially since after I finish this post I'm going to bury myself in grant writing. Multiple grant deadlines are approaching, and, given that most of my grant support expires towards the middle of next year, I have to go full tilt to keep my lab funded and keep my people employed. Such is how it will be throughout most of 2009 until I obtain some more funding.
As I mentioned nearly weeks ago, we have a new six month old puppy named Bailey. He's definitely changed our life in a lot of good ways. One thing that I've noticed…