oracknows | June 29, 2008Lest I forget my obligations here, I have to post a reminder that the 90th Edition of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching and will be here on Thursday, July 3. In fact, because it's being hosted by prominent Australian skeptic Peter Bowditch at the Millenium Project, it may well be earlier than that given the rather large time difference. (Of course, if you're in Asia or Australia you won't notice.) That means there's less time than usual to get your submissions to Peter before July 2 for inclusion in the Circle. So get cracking while there's still time! The contact information and…
oracknows | June 29, 2008I have some bad news for the medical blogosphere. Well, actually Sid Schwab does. Apparently, he's decided to drop out of the blogosphere, at least for now.
Sid's grown enormously as a blogger since he first started hawking his book a couple of years ago in the comments here. He got on my nerves at first, but I quickly took a liking to him and his blog, realizing that his early self-promotion came from his being new to the blogosphere and not realizing that too much of that sort of stuff is generally frowned upon. Now he's a well-respected medical blogger, and definitely one of the best. The…
oracknows | June 28, 2008Apparently there's a chiropracter named Billy Sticker running for President. His platform:
My platform:
To increase your patient count by 200% during my first term
To increase your income by 200%
Pass legislation designating Chiropractic the Official Health Care of America
Reduce our dependency on pharmaceuticals (because Chiropractic would be the official health care!)
He even has his own video coverage:
Say it ain't so! A woo-meister for President. That'd be a step down even from our current President! It's even worse than that, though. He's apparently a guy who sells marketing…
oracknows | June 27, 2008...or maybe Sunday morning, as I don't know how long it will take to get this by BitTorrent, the penultimate episode of series 4 of Doctor Who (if you're a Doctor Who fan and haven't seen the last couple of episodes before this Saturday's episode The Stolen Earth, beware the spoilers--don't start the videos if you want to remain pure):
This looks like a Who fanboy's dream. Of course, even though new Doctor Who episodes make it to the U.S. to air on the SciFi Channel only around three or four weeks after they air in the U.K., this fanboy can't wait that long, especially after seeing this…
oracknows | June 27, 2008I realize that I've been mighty hard on Jenny McCarthy these last several months. I've made fun of her for her idiocy, her arrogance of ignorance, and her antivaccination lunacy, not to mention her utter ignorance of science, and, yes, I've been rather vicious at times. However, she richly deserved it. Indeed, I argue that in fact my reaction was actually mild in comparison to the sheer lunacy that she regularly spews and the threat to public health her ignorant antivaccinationist activism represents.
But it's Friday, and that means it's fun day. That means it's time for an excursion into…
oracknows | June 26, 2008A few months ago, I wrote a post lamenting how science- and evidence-based medicine has lost the linguistic high ground to the woo peddlers, those who have "rebranded" quackery first into "alternative" medicine, then into "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), and more recently into "integrative" medicine (as though "integrating" antiscience and pseudoscience into effective, science-based medicine somehow adds anything of value to medicine) and discussing strategies for reclaiming it.
Now, I've found out how CAM promoters pulled it off. Dr. Wallace Sampson has the scoop and dishes it…
oracknows | June 26, 2008
Sigh.
He's baaack. Yes, that dualism-loving Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, that "intelligent design" apologist neurosurgeon whose nonsense has driven me time and time again to contemplate hiding my head in a paper bag or even a Doctor Doom mask because of the shame of knowing that he is also a surgeon, that physician who denies that an understanding of evolution is important to medicine and who just doesn't know when to quit, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back to embarrass me yet again. It's been a long time--months, actually--and, quite frankly I found the break from his specious…
oracknows | June 25, 2008It's rare that the mainstream media gets it right about vaccines and autism, and when they do I feel obligated to point it out. Such is the case with Sam Wang's article The Autism Myth Lives On. It's well worth reading, even though it's a couple of months old. (How I missed it when it first appeared, I don't know.) Wang even nails some of the reasons why this myth persists:
Although her [Jenny McCarthy's] concept of evidence is flawed, I don't blame her. The error highlights how our brains are wired to think. Like the authors of the 1998 study, she concluded that two events happening around…
oracknows | June 25, 2008...from one of Michigan State University Professor Richard Lenski's E. coli cultures.
Lenski's second response to the clueless "request" of the creationist idiot Andrew Schlafly to provide his raw data to him for "independent review" supporting a recent PNAS paper (more here) by him that is yet another in a line of papers by evolutionary biologists that pretty much destroy the myth of "irreproducible complexity" deeply humbles me. It's a classic in sliding the knife into one's foe, carefully dissecting free an organ, pulling that organ out with a flourish, only to plunge to plunge the knife…
oracknows | June 25, 2008I was perusing the feeds of my fellow ScienceBloggers the other night when I came across a post by ERV that really resonated with me. In it, she expounds on the benefits of doing things "old school" in the lab, specifically with respect to having hard evidence to defend oneself if ever accused of scientific misconduct. She has a point, but that's not why the post caught my attention. I've actually been struggling with the conflict between "old school" and "new school" recently.
You see, I've recently been in the position where I've had to add people to my lab, and in fact the entire staff of…
oracknows | June 24, 2008Remember the case of Clifford Shoemaker, lawyer for the antivaccinationist mercury militia who tried to subpoena Kathleen Seidel under incredibly dubious legal reasoning in order to harass and intimidate her? Remember how the subpoena was quashed?
One word: Sanctioned!
Woo-hoo!
Quoth Judge James R. Muirhead:
Clifford J. Shoemaker's action is an abuse of legal process, a waste of judicial resources and an unnecessary waste of the time and expense to the purported deponent.
The Clerk of Court is directed to forward a certified copy of this order, the motion to quash, the show cause order, and…
oracknows | June 24, 2008If there's one thing I've learned in my years of delving into pseudoscience, quackery, and alternative medicine is that conspiracy theories are just like Lays potato chips; cranks can't eat just one. No, they have to stick their hand in the bag and pull out a huge, heaping handful and snarf it all down. Believers in "alternative medicine" quackery often also believe in New Age woo or other bizarre unscientific beliefs. Scratch a "9/11 Truther" and you'll often also find a Holocaust denier. One of my fellow ScienceBloggers, Mark Hoofnagle, has a great term for how cranks seem unable to be…
oracknows | June 23, 2008
If you happen to be a blogger, has there ever been anything that you meant to blog about, but it totally slipped your mind? This is just such an item for me.
Yes, multiple people e-mailed me about this on Friday, and for some reason in my amusement at David Kirby's antics over the weekend twisting a CDC report and then looking even more clueless as he modified his post in response to his errors being pointed out, producing a mangled mess that made even less sense than before, in all the fun, I totally forgot about the item.
And my blog mascot is not at all pleased. Here's why:
MOSCOW - A…
oracknows | June 23, 2008If there's one thing that lay people (and, indeed, many physicians) don't understand about screening for cancer is that it is anything but a simple matter. Intuitively, it seems that earlier detection should always be better, and it can be. However, as I explained in two lengthy posts last year, such is not always the case. To understand why requires an understanding of cancer biology. The reason is the extreme heterogeneity of tumor behavior and prognosis. This variability was well described in a study from about a month ago, in which it was observed that the doubling time of breast cancers…
oracknows | June 22, 2008I could resist a brief mention of this. Remember yesterday's post, when I discussed how EpiWonk had deconstructed and demolished David Kirby's latest mangling of epidemiology and willful misreading of government reports? Apparently it had an effect. It would appear that Mr. Kirby may actually have read it and taken it to heart. (Either that, or his capable of shame after all.) How do I know? He's made major modifications of his original post and reposted them.
Out with the old (including the old title): CDC: Vaccine Study Design "Uninformative and Potentially Misleading"
In with the new (…
oracknows | June 21, 2008At this stage of the game, I almost feel sorry for David Kirby.
Think about it. He's made his name and what little fame he has (which isn't much outside of the tinhat crowd that thinks the guv'mint is intentionally poisoning their children with vaccines to make them all autistic) almost entirely on the basis of one book published over three years ago, Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy. Of course, the question of whether mercury from the thimerosal preservative that used to be in vaccines, or vaccines themselves, cause autism has not been a…
oracknows | June 20, 2008...Orac might be in trouble:
(Click for the full comic.)
I wonder if I should hire a guard.
Actually, I think reading Respectful Insolence⢠might do Jenny McCarthy some good, especially this post (or maybe this post, too). Unfortunately, she's too deluded and arrogant to realize how scientifically ignorant she is; so it would probably just be a waste.
oracknows | June 20, 2008I know I like to say that woo is eternal, and it is. That doesn't, however, mean that individual examples of woo are necessarily eternal. Some, it seems, are. Does anyone doubt, for example, that homeopathy, which has been around for over two hundred years now, will still be around 200 years from now? I'd like to think it won't, but fear that it will, even though I know I won't be around to find out. Ditto for energy-based "healing" and naturopathy, among others. On the other hand, not all woo is eternal. Sometimes the reason is fashion, which, as we all know, is fickle. Sometimes the reason…
oracknows | June 19, 2008Better late than never, they always say. Michael Meadon may have been a few hours later than the usual edition of the Skeptics' Circle, but when he finally delivered the 89th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle it was well worth the wait. He even showed me a promising new blogger:
Redonkulous Redundancy is a new blogger and first-time Circle participant (be nice!) who aptly skewers CAM advocates for their bait-and-switch tactics: yes mainstream medicine has (serious) problems, no, CAM is not the answer.
Here's hoping I can give him a little boost for that spot-on post.
Next up to host is, believe…
oracknows | June 19, 2008...and his name is Edzard Ernst.
And here's the reason why.
Anyone who can rile up homeopaths that much is my kind of guy.