oracknows | October 8, 2008Here we go again.
It seems just yesterday that I was casting a skeptical eye on yet another dubious acupuncture study. OK, it wasn't just yesterday, but it was less than two weeks ago when I discussed why a study that purported to show that acupuncture worked as well as drug therapy for hot flashes due to breast cancer therapy-induced menopause. Unfortunately, these days these sorts of dubious studies seem to be popping up fast and furious like Whac-A-Mole, so much so that I can't always keep up with them. So it is again, although this time it's acupressure, not acupuncture. Unfortunately,…
oracknows | October 7, 2008...it'll be because the flu vaccine poisoned me, of course!
That's right. Today I got my flu shot, complete with thimerosal and formaldehyde! I do put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. No word on whether there was any of the dreaded Polysorbate 80 in the vaccine, though. Oh, well. Maybe next time.
Also, while we're at it, my latest post over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club is up and ready for your perusal. Read it, enjoy it, trash it if you like. Just don't ignore it.
You know how much I hate it when my posts are ignored.
oracknows | October 7, 2008On Friday, while discussing what is perhaps the aspect of Autism's False Prophets that is at the same time the most important set of observations (namely, how the media and government miscommunicate science and how the public seems hardwired to misunderstand science) and its most glaring omission (namely, suggestions how to overcome this problem), I talked about "framing" or how we could potentially represent the current science on vaccines in a compelling way that will be persuasive to the bulk of concerned parents. We know that hard core antivaccinationist parents will not be persuaded by…
oracknows | October 7, 2008For women undergoing menopause, hot flashes are a real problem. In my specialty, as I've pointed out before, women undergoing treatment for breast cancer are often forced into premature menopause by the treatments to which we subject them. It can be chemotherapy, although far more often it's the estrogen-blocking drugs that we use to treat breast cancers that have the estrogen receptor. Estrogen stimulates such tumors to grow, and blocking estrogen is a very effective treatment for them, be it with tamoxifen or the newer aromatase inhibors like Arimidex. The utterly predictable consequence,…
oracknows | October 6, 2008...with the 97th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which is due to be hosted at Evolved and Rational on Thursday, October 9. That's less than three days away, folks. There's still a couple of days left to get your skeptical entries submitted to Evolved Rationalist. So, if you've procrastinated thus far, remember that time's running out.
Then join us all at Evolved and Rational on Thursday for a sampling of the best the skeptical blogosphere has to offer over the last couple of weeks.
oracknows | October 6, 2008Sometimes I have to look for blog ideas, trolling through various alternative medicine sites, medical news sites, or science news feeds or my medical and science journals. Sometimes ideas fall on me seemingly out of the blue. This is one of the latter situations. This time around, as I do twice a month I was perusing the very latest issue of Cancer Research, hot off the presses October 1. As I did so, it didn't take me long to come across an article from the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia entitled Vitamin C Antagonizes the…
oracknows | October 6, 2008As you may remember, the evening after the Hollywood face of the antivaccine P.R. machine Jenny McCarthy was scheduled to take part in a web chat. At the time, I suggested sending questions in to the Oprah website, to see if any would get through. I'm sure there was some serious screening and vetting of possible questions; so I suggested trying to word them in such a way as to indicate Jenny's ignorance without triggering the censors. Apparently never was heard a discouraging word in the web chat (big surprise there), but apparently one rather clever wag did manage to get a question through…
oracknows | October 5, 2008I'm still buried working on next week's talk and my part of the center grant. Fortunately, Saturday Night Live provides some temporary entertainment until I can get out from under the pile. Once again Tina Fey nails it, especially the "maverick" part. While watching the debate last week, by the end I thought I was going to throw something at the TV screen if I heard Palin refer to herself and McCain as "mavericks" again.
I know, I know, this is becoming a bit of a habit. Don't worry, though. I have something nearly finished for tomorrow, and I see a light at the end of the tunnel next week…
oracknows | October 4, 2008Unfortunately, I'm going to be ensconced in my Sanctum Sanctorum most of the day, pounding out text far less fun than the text I like to pound out for Respectful Insolence. However, I have to admit that this video sums up the attitude behind a whole lot of woo that I like to apply a skeptical deconstruction to--with music!
oracknows | October 3, 2008...at The ScienceBlogs Book Club has been posted. Go forth and enjoy. As always for these Book Club Posts, no comments are allowed here. Got a response? Hate my guts? Think I'm in the pocket of Big Pharma, Big Government, and the Illuminati, too? At least for this post, say it over there!
oracknows | October 3, 2008You can tell I'm really busy when I fall behind my reading of the scientific literature to the point where I miss an article highly relevant to topics I'm interested in, be they my laboratory research, clinical interests, or just general interests, such as translational research. As you know, I like to think of myself as a translational researcher. Translational research is research that (or so we try to do) spans both basic science and clinical science; i.e., bridges the gap between basic and clinical science. Now don't get me wrong; I don't devalue basic science, and I've said so many times…
oracknows | October 2, 2008Note: The central idea for this post is the same as that of a post I did a few months ago. However, given some of the assertions and comments made by Dr. Offit in Autism's False Prophets, I thought they were worth discussing again, especially given how many readers are around who aren't regular readers of mine.
One of the major points made by Dr. Offit in Autism's False Prophets is how badly the media deals with scientific issues and stories in which science is a major component. Indeed, he devotes two full chapters, Science and the Media and Science and Society, to a lament that…
oracknows | October 2, 2008Given that über-quackery booster Mike Adams decided to compare "Western medicine" to the subprime mortgage mess, I wondered what the real cause of this financial meltdown was. Leave it to our friends in the right wing blogosphere and media to find the real culprit: The Community Reinvestment Act. That's right...
...it's all the poor people's fault!
oracknows | October 2, 2008After having posted about Jenny McCarthy, my brain hurt so much from the neuron-apoptosing idiocy that she always delivers that I decided I needed to move on to something that wouldn't assault my reason and quite so much. So I headed on over to that uber-repository of quackery and paranoid conspiracy theories, Mike Adam's Natural News.
It's true. Jenny is so dumb that Mike Adams looks intelligent by comparison, and that's saying a lot. Well, not really. In actuality, they're both black holes of negative intelligence, sucking all knowledge and science out of whatever environment self they land…
oracknows | October 1, 2008I guess that since my resistance failed, and I couldn't resist posting yesterday about the burning stupid that is Jenny McCarthy and her arrogance of ignorance in claiming that vaccines caused her son's autism and her campaigning to "Green Our Vaccines" (in reality, a smokescreen to hide her antivaccinationism), I thought why not go whole hog and get it out of my system? Let's just take in a concentrated dose, as the more Jenny talks the more she discredits the antivaccine movement among anyone with a lick of scientific literacy:
Embedded video from CNN Video
Jenny's on fire with stupid!…
oracknows | October 1, 2008...has been posted over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club.
Head on over. As will be the case for all my posts at the Book Club, please leave comments there, not here. Thanks.
oracknows | October 1, 2008Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste...
Well, not really. I might have one of the two. Or not.
Be that as it may, I'm Orac, and I blog regularly at Respectful Insolence. In the more than two and a half years I've been with ScienceBlogs (not to mention the more than a year before that on my own), I've become known as its resident "vaccine blogger." True, others around here sometimes do posts about vaccines, antivaccine lunacy, and the discredited idea that vaccines somehow cause autism, but with nowhere near the frequency and intensity that I do. Without a doubt,…
oracknows | October 1, 2008Readers may be wondering why I haven't written about Jenny McCarthy's latest brain dead outburst against Amanda Peet. (Actually, brain dead is too kind a description of it, given that Jenny's retort in essence boils down to her having an "angry mob" on her side making Amanda "completely wrong.") It's because I decided to try to resist for once in my life. And I was doing really good at it, too, even though several readers sent me links to various stories about Jenny McCarthy's outburst. Still, I resisted. Even after antivaccinationist financier J. B. Handley wrote a post demanding of Amanda…
oracknows | October 1, 2008Just a quick announcement here:
The ScienceBlogs Book Club is back up and running, and this time the book under discussion is the latest by that Dark Lord of Vaccination himself, that Darth Vader to the antivaccinationist Luke Skywalker, otherwise known as Satan Incarnate to Jenny McCarthy, J.B. Handley, Andrew Wakefield, Dan Olmsted, and the crew of antivaccinationists spreading misinformation and endangering public health and promoting an amazing panoply of quackery to "cure" autism, Dr. Paul Offit. The book under discussion is Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the…
oracknows | October 1, 2008When I first started blogging, I liked to refer to myself as a booster of evidence-based medicine (EBM). These days, I'm not nearly as likely to refer to myself this way. It's not because I've become a woo-meister of course. Even a cursory reading of this blog would show that that is most definitely not the case.
So what's changed? Basically, I've come to the realization that EBM is an imperfect tool. Don't get me wrong, EBM goes a long way towards systematizing how we approach clinical data, but there's one huge flaw in it. (I can just see a quack somewhere quote-mining that sentence: "Orac…