oracknows | January 16, 2009I hate to finish up the week on a bit of a downer, but unfortunately this week I really wasn't in the mood to do justice to Your Friday Dose of Woo, even though I have at least a couple of potential targets--I mean subjects--to cover for my (hopefully) fun little Friday exercise. I was gearing up to try anyway, when I saw something in my e-mail that saddened me greatly. (More on that in a moment.) I even thought of trying to pull off a post on a peer-reviewed article, even though it was pretty late when I got home. However, due to the careful reading and examination of data required, those…
oracknows | January 15, 2009Here we go.
It's a new year, and, now that the festivities of the holiday season are now clearly a couple of weeks in the past and the deepest darkest depths of winter have descended upon huge swaths of the U.S., what can warm the cockles of a skeptical heart better than a fresh hot blast of great skeptical blogging, courtesy of the Skeptics' Circle? Ringing in 2009 is Bug Girl at Bug Girl's Blog with the 103rd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, the LOL bug edition.
Next up is Space City Skeptics, where the Circle will--if you'll excuse the term--take off (or maybe I should say "land") two…
oracknows | January 15, 2009P.Z. Myers turned me on to a phenomenal proposal at Change.gov, the website of President-Elect Barack Obama's transition team:
Defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine:
Here's a way to increase the available funding to NIH without increasing the NIH budget: halt funding to NCCAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This Center was created not by scientists, who never thought it was a good idea, but by Congress, and specifically by just two Congressmen in the 1990's who believed in particular "alternative" (but scientifically dubious)…
oracknows | January 15, 2009My dear readers, I beg your indulgence for the moment.
I had been planning on doing something a bit more serious than what I've been up to lately. Believe it or not, NaturalNews.com pointed me to a study that's actually pretty interesting. It even challenges to some extend existing results. Of course, Mike Adams' minion's interpretation of the study was so wrong as to be not even wrong, as they say (so what else is new?). But therein lies the entertainment value with the educational value.
Sometimes, however, something happens, and a followup to something I've written before is demanded. It…
oracknows | January 14, 2009Good news! After an extended and distinguished stint as a coblogger on Denialism.com, blog bud PalMD has decided to resurrect his own blog, the place where he got started, White Coat Underground. The only difference is that this time he's doing it as a member of the ScienceBlogs collective.
Head on over and say hi. Tell him Orac sent you.
oracknows | January 14, 2009Too bad the holidays are over. I've found something that would make a perfect gift for J. B. Handley, Jenny McCarthy, Mike Adams, and other "friends" of the blog. After all, clearly scientific arguments aren't working.
Hmmm. Perhaps a certain physiologist-blogger would be interested in purchasing these items to give out as well.
oracknows | January 14, 2009I find it hard to believe that we're already two weeks into 2009. The older I get and the longer I've been blogging, it seems, the faster time files. It's gotten so bad that it's not at all infrequent that I remember a post that I've written, go searching for it, and end up amazed that it's several months or even a couple of years old. In any case, 2009 has gotten off to a pretty decent start, with posts about HIV/AIDS denialism, the probable selection of Dr. Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General, a followup on Tong Ren, Holocaust denial, and the "bait and switch" of Deepak Chopra and "alternative…
oracknows | January 13, 2009Last week, I did multiple posts about the death of HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore of what for all the world looked like an HIV-related pneumonia, the excuses HIV/AIDS denialists made to try to persuade people that it wasn't AIDS, and the attempted coverup of damning posts. In the past, I've also taken a certain comedian by the name of Bill Maher to task for his antivaccine views, germ theory denialism, and embrace of detoxification quackery and conspiracy mongering about big pharma.
I should have known that wasn't all. I should have realized that he would be sympathetic to HIV/AIDS…
oracknows | January 13, 2009About four weeks ago, I wrote what I thought to be an amusing piece about how our blog "buddy" J. B. Handley, antivaccine advocate extraordinaire and now second fiddle in the organization he founded (Generation Rescue) to a Jenny-come-lately former purveyor of Indigo Child woo previously best known for being Playboy Playmate of the Year, a game show hostess on MTV, the star of her own short-lived sitcom, and a gross-out comedienne known for eating her own vomit or sitting in a pool of her own menstrual blood. Unfortunately, along with her A-list boyfriend Jim Carrey, this former D-list star…
oracknows | January 12, 2009In responding to Deepak Chopra's "integrative medicine" nonsense from last week that I "http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/01/the_three_musketeers_of_woo_m…," Derek Lowe proposes the best trial of Qi Gong ever:
"Chronic pain is one of the major sources of worker's compensation claims costs, yet studies show that it is often susceptible to acupuncture and Qi Gong. Herbs usually have far fewer side effects than pharmaceuticals".
Studies show, do they? Is there really a believable study that shows that Qi-freaking-Gong, of all things, is good for chronic pain? Ancient hokum about "energy…
oracknows | January 12, 2009Here's a cool idea. Take a newbie, who has never read Charles Darwins' On the Origin of Species, and have the newbie actually read the book. Then have him blog each chapter. That's exactly what John Whitfield, London-based freelance science writer, is doing, and ScienceBlogs has him over at Blogging the Origin. Check it out. John promises to have all the chapters of Darwin's seminal work blogged by the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth on February 12.
You know, come to think of it, I've never read all of Origin. I've read a couple of chapters of it, but I've never read the entire book.…
oracknows | January 12, 2009The seemingly never-ending quest of advocates of unscientific medicine, the so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) movement is to convince policy makers, patients, and physicians that, really and truly, it no longer deserves the qualifier of "alternative," that it is in fact mainstream and even "scientific." That very search for respectability without accountability is the very reason why "alternative" medicine originally morphed into CAM in order to soften the "alternative" label a decade or two ago. Increasingly, however, advocates of such highly implausible medical…
oracknows | January 11, 2009It's amazing how fast the time passes. The year 2008 is now history. 2009 is nearly two weeks old. But, for purposes of this blog, most important of all is that the very first Skeptics' Circle of 2009 is fast approaching. It will be held at Bug Girl's Blog on Thursday, January 15, a mere three days away.
But fear not! There is still time to get your best skeptical blogging to Bug Girl for inclusion in this very first gathering of skeptical bloggers of the new year. So do it already!
Also, if you want to get your name on the list of hosts of the Skeptics' Circle, all you have to do is to e-…
oracknows | January 10, 2009I don't watch Private Practice. I didn't like Grey's Anatomy, which, every time I caught part of it, struck me as the cheesiest sort of medical soap opera, a General Hospital transplanted to prime time. Given that Private Practice is a spinoff of Grey's Anatomy, I never saw any reason whatsoever to watch. However, on Thursday night an episode aired that royally pissed off the antivaccine contingent, and that has to be a good thing. The episode, Contamination, featured a storyline in which an unvaccinated child shows up in the emergency room with the measles. The parents are antivaccine and…
oracknows | January 9, 2009...but only temporarily!
As you may have heard, our benevolent leaders at ScienceBlogs are finally doing a major upgrade of our blog publishing software. That's the good news. I'm hoping the back end is much easier to use and more responsive. The bad news is that the whole ScienceBlogs site is going to locked down. It will still be there. You can still read it and browse every scintillating post, but none of the ScienceBloggers will be able to post, and none of the readers will be able to comment. Bummer. Hopefully the upgrade will be worth it.
The lockdown period will begin at 1 PM.…
oracknows | January 9, 2009Three weeks ago, I reintroduced my readers to one of the most amazingly skilled weaver of woo tales who has ever lived. I'm referring, of course, to Lionel Milgrom, the man who can pepper his homeopathic woo with quantum nonsense the way Bobby Flay seasons his latest creation with various spices. Now, I'm about to admit a huge hole in my knowledge here. I realize that it seems simply unbelievable that I would have a hole at all in my knowledge, much less a major hole, but there you are. Not even cranky supercomputers are perfect, I guess.
The huge hole in my knowledge revealed by my…
oracknows | January 9, 2009During the confirmation hearings yesterday for Tom Daschle, who is to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services, there was this exchange:
J. REED: As you grapple with health care reform, you're also grappling with the budget, so good luck on both matters. But if you could pay particular attention to Title VII, that would be very appreciative. In a similar vein, Section 317 of CDC's program on immunization is so important. It's been estimated that we need to provide these about $1.1 billion to cover all the recommended vaccines for eligible children and adults. And frankly, we provided…
oracknows | January 8, 2009As much of a completely disgusting sleazebag as I think he is, at some level I grudgingly have to admire Larry Flynt. He never misses an opportunity for self-promotion and annoying the hell out of politicians, and he's back now, promoting himself and annoying the hell out of politicians.
This time, he's asking for a $5 billion bailout for the porn industry:
Another major American industry is asking for assistance as the global financial crisis continues: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a…
oracknows | January 8, 2009First fellow ScienceBlogger Abel Pharmboy live-blogged (sort of) his vasectomy. That record could not stand, however. You just knew it wouldn't be long before someone tried to outdo him.
Now Kev is live-Tweeting (live-Twittering?) his own vasectomy. He's at the surgeon's office right now, but tells us the surgeon is running a little late! Follow along, if you dare.
oracknows | January 8, 2009This blog is primarily about medicine, the scientific basis of medicine, and general skepticism and critical thinking. As part of my interest in skepticism, a particular form of pseudoscience and pseudohistory that I first took an interest in about a decade ago, namely Holocaust "revisionism," which is, of course, in reality Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is the denial or minimization of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime, in particular the industrialized genocide of European Jewry. The reasons, as I've discussed time and time again, virtually always boil down to a combination of…