oracknows | September 28, 2007
In looking back at all the various bizarre incarnations of woo that I've covered during the last year or so since I started doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was wondering if there was a form of woo that I had not covered yet. Woo seems to come in several forms, such as energy woo, water woo, pH woo, "detoxification" woo, religious woo, and psychic woo, among others, with certain themes that just keep recurring over and over. I'm sure there's enough material there for a Ph.D. thesis on the classification of woo, if some intrepid graduate student were interested. For this week, I was looking…
oracknows | September 27, 2007Damn that Factitian! Now he's gone too far! In hosting the 70th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, he's revealed some of the deepest darkest secrets of the Skeptical Atheistic Darwinist Scientific Conspiracy to Conquer All (SADSCCA), also known as The Conspiracy Factory in some circles. And you'll never believe who the leader of the conspiracy from whom we all take our marching orders is!
I may have to become more insolent and less respectful. After all, our leader has commanded it:
Yes. Put Orac on it. And someone tell him to stop being so respectful, and more insolent. I prefer the insolence…
oracknows | September 27, 2007I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for the mercury militia.
Think about it. They've been claiming for the past several years that the mercury in the thimerosal used as a preservative in childhood vaccines is a cause of autism. If you believe Generation Rescue, A-CHAMP, SAFEMINDS, and various other activist groups, vaccines are the root of all neurodevelopmental evil, culminating in what to them seems to be the most evil of evil condition, autism. Yet, in study after study in the new millennium, no correlation has been found to implicated their favorite bête noire thimerosal, which serves as…
oracknows | September 26, 2007I hadn't thought of this possible consequence of global warming before if homeopathy were actually true, but it's frightening to contemplate.
Fortunately, I think that even in this case the level of dilution wouldn't be enough.
oracknows | September 26, 2007Never let it be said that Orac doesn't give the people what they want.
Well, most of the time, anyway.
What I'm referring to is a recent German study about acupuncture for low back pain that's been making its way around the media. I had actually been planning on commenting about it yesterday, but Iranian President (and Holocaust denier) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University intervened and took me on one of my occasional diversions away from science and medicine into the history of the Holocaust, Holocaust denial, and politics. In just that two day interval, I've been deluged…
oracknows | September 25, 2007Before moving on to discussions of alternative medicine (don't worry, there'll be one in the morning), I couldn't resist one last dig regarding Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim in his appearance at Columbia University on Monday that there are no gays in Iran...
Sorry Mahmoud, but there was an Iranian contestant in the International Mr. Gay Competition.
Adding insult to injury, Mr. Gay Iran didn't win the International Mr. Gay Competition. Nathan Shaked from Israel did.
(Via Andrew Sullivan.)
oracknows | September 25, 2007
While I happen to have found myself back on the subject of the Holocaust and Holocaust denial again today, I thought I'd mention this, something I've been meaning to blog about since I found out about it last week.
Beginning this week, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will start featuring a display that, to me at least, is almost as disturbing as the usual pictures of the horrors of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps with which we've become so familiar and to whose horrors we have perhaps become inured. Basically, it's a recently discovered scrapbook with photos depicting the daily life of…
oracknows | September 25, 2007Andrew Mathis gives his perspective.
And an excellent analysis it is, too. One brief excerpt:
...I have to wonder exactly where a man who runs a police state gets off asking a question like this. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran does not allow religious freedoms outside those recognized by the Qur'an. People are thrown in jail -- routinely -- for opposing the government. When government opponents visit the country, they are jailed. I say this without qualification: Every single country that has a law against Holocaust denial is a more free country that Iran. EVERY LAST ONE.…
oracknows | September 25, 2007Iranian President (and Holocaust denier) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad showed up at Columbia University yesterday to give a speech. Given my interest in Holocaust history and Holocaust denial I had debated whether to comment on it before it happened. Given my contempt for him, his anti-Semitism, and his Holocaust denial, I was rather torn by the whole affair. On the one hand, I am very much in favor of free speech, and having this loon speak can in one way be argued to be evidence of what is great about this country (although it would have been more convincing if Columbia had a better record on this…
oracknows | September 24, 2007While wandering through the medical center last week, I came across a rather unusual vending machine, one quite unlike any that I had ever seen before. It definitely hadn't been there the week before, but there it was now, around the corner from the hospital cafeteria:
Perfect if you're on call and feel the need for a potato knish at 3 AM.
I am, however, amused by the "24/6" label on the machine. Doesn't it work on the Sabbath?
oracknows | September 24, 2007Pity poor John Ioannidis.
The man does provocative work about the reliability of scientific studies as published in the peer-reviewed literature, and his reward for trying to point out shortcomings in how we as scientists and clinical researchers do studies and evaluate evidence is to be turned into an icon for cranks and advocates of pseudoscience--or even antiscience. I first became aware of Ioannidis two years ago around the time of publication of a paper by him that caused a stir, entitled Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research. In that study,…
oracknows | September 23, 2007ERV explains: Vaccines strengthen superpowers.
Take that, Jenny McCarthy!
oracknows | September 23, 2007Believe it or not, this post is related, albeit somewhat tangentially, to my area of expertise, breast cancer. It's also related to one of my great loves in life, namely loud, obnoxious rock and roll. Unfortunately, it involves bad art and an album cover so puzzling that, even when considering the source, I have a hard time figuring out just what the heck they were thinking when they put this album cover together.
I'm talking about, believe it or not, the cover of the new Ted Nugent album Love Grenade.
I know, I know, it's not as if one expects the cover of a Ted Nugent album to make sense.…
oracknows | September 22, 2007Two words: Necrotizing pancreatitis.
There's nothing like repeated trips to the operating room to scoop out bits of dead pancreas, trips sometimes so frequent that we leave the abdomen open to facilitate repeat visits, in patients who are about as sick as any patient you'll ever see. There are few, if any, problems in general surgery more challenging, and saving such patients gives an enormous sense of accomplishment. It's also one area that distinguishes general surgeons from all other specialties. There's no other surgeon or internist who can handle these cases. When the pancreatitis…
oracknows | September 22, 2007I have to tip my hat to Kevin Leitch. I really do. He's done something that I couldn't manage to force myself to do, at least not completely.
He's subjected himself to the entire episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in which Jenny McCarthy showed up to plug her new book about her fight to "save" her child from autism, Louder Than Words: A Mother's Journey in Healing Autism.
Far be it from me to attack Jenny McCarthy for wanting to help her autistic son. Her devotion is admirable, and virtually all parents, other than crappy parents, want to help their children. The problem is that, in seeking to…
oracknows | September 21, 2007
Time flies.
Amazingly, another Skeptics' Circle is coming around the pike far faster than I would have expected. This time around, it will be hosted by longtime commenter (and now blogger) Factitian over at Conspiracy Factory and will take its place in the skeptical rogues' gallery of past editions on Thursday, September 27. For your edification, Factitian has posted blog-specific instructions for submitting. Read them, heed them, love them, and submit your best skeptical blogging before the deadline!
As always, if you're interested in hosting a Circle yourself (and if you're a blogger who…
oracknows | September 21, 2007
As I usually do on Thursday nights, I was perusing my legendary Folder of Woo looking for just the thing to be interesting and entertaining to both me as the blogger and you as the reader. As happens occasionally, nothing was really doing it for me. Nothing was getting me fired up to launch into yet another installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo. I thought about going back to the well of Life Technology (believe it or not, there is still some woo there to which I have not yet applied my special brand of Respectful Insolenceâ¢), but somehow I just wasn't in the mood. Let's face it, after…
oracknows | September 20, 2007I don't know how I missed this one, but it jut goes to show that antivaccination ignorance with respect to autism is truly a bipartisan affair. You have folks like Representative Dan Burton on the right, and on the left you have this particular Daily Kos diarist, who falls like a ton of bricks for the recent Generation Rescue "study" of autism rates in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children:
The first ever study comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated children was completed with startling results.
Vaccines Caused Autism
Vaccines Caused Asthma
Vaccines Caused ADHD
The study was privated funded…
oracknows | September 20, 2007In today's earlier post, a commenter stated:
You sure do like that "long run for a short slide" phrase.
I wondered: Is that true? Do I use that phrase too much? So, like any good blogger, I did a search. And what did I find? I found that, in the entire history of this blog since it's been on ScienceBlogs (a year and a half now), I've only used the phrase a grand total of two timestwo times in less than two days, which may have given the impression that I'm overly enamored of that phrase.) In the history of my old blog, there was not a single use of the phrase.
I therefore conclude that I do…