oracknows | June 6, 2007I'm back from the ASCO Meeting in Chicago. As promised, I'll try to post some photos tomorrow to give you a sense of just how monumentally huge this meeting is. I probably won't have time to blog about the clinical science presented until Friday or next week, but we'll see. In the meantime, let me share with you the serious gasoline sticker shock I suffered coming from the East Coast to the Midwest. Below is a "discount" gas station at W. North Avenue and N. Ashland:
Remember, this is a discount gas station, much like....much like Citgo:
This is nearly a dollar more expensive than in my…
oracknows | June 6, 2007Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it's been quite a while since I've featured the antics of a certain character who's become a bit of the bête noire of my fellow surgeons. I'm referring, of course, to Dr. Michael Egnor, a renowned neurosurgeon from SUNY Stony Brook who's made 2007 a very embarrassing year indeed for surgeons like me who accept evolution as a valid scientific theory, as, in fact, the entire underpinning of modern biological and medical sciences. Starting back in March, having whetted his appetite for looking foolish by jumping into the comments of a posts in…
oracknows | June 5, 2007Somehow this one passed under my radar four years ago. However, the there's a reason for this. First, I wasn't blogging then and thus wasn't paying as close attention to alternative medicine. Also, apparently, the State of Oregon didn't know about it until 16 months after the fact, which was still before I started blogging. In any case, behold the sad case of Sandy Boylan:
Sandy Boylan was a contagiously cheerful woman whose hobby was handing out bouquets of homegrown flowers. But in the summer of 2003, she was scared.
The 53-year-old B&B owner from Dallas, Ore., had been told by her…
oracknows | June 5, 2007One of the common refrains you'll hear from alties about "conventional" medicine is that it's a business, that it's all about money. Never mind that, for instance, it's not uncommon for primary care doctors like family practice and pediatricians to net well under $100,000 a year and that many physicians are struggling to maintain their practices, squeezed between lower reimbursements and higher office expenses. Don't get me wrong; I'm not claiming that most doctors aren't making a comfortable living. Most are. Some even do quite well, particularly procedure-intensive specialties, although the…
oracknows | June 4, 2007It's day three of the ASCO Meeting here in Chicago.
So far, I have to say, it's been a bit underwhelming. Unlike some years past, there don't appear to have been any real blockbuster results to report; rather, lots of incremental studies were presented. There's really only one study presented that I might blog, mainly because it relates to posts that I did before about early detection of cancer and using MRI to screen for breast cancer, but that will probably have to wait until tomorrow or after I get back. In this impression, I don't appear to be alone, as Dr. Len Lichtenfield, the CEO of…
oracknows | June 4, 2007It was a nondescript room, a board room much like board rooms found in corporate offices across the length and breadth of the U.S., or even around the world. There was the tasteful built-in wood bookshelves loaded with books and journals, for instance. Given the nature of this company, the journals included titles such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Pharmacology, and other scientific titles, and the textbooks included Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, among other weighty tomes. Lining the walls were pictures of men in either suits or lab coats, the…
oracknows | June 3, 2007Just as a brief followup to my post about being carded twice in a bar despite being a member of the over 40 crowd, I can't help but make a brief comment on something else that happened while we were sitting back enjoying some beer.
We were inside, but there was an outdoor sidewalk cafe area with tables as well. As I was sitting there sipping my brew, I noticed a guy in surgical scrubs showing up in the outdoor area. Not surprisingly, he appeared to be trying to chat up a couple of young women who were also out there.
I had to restrain myself from bursting out in laughter.
OK, I suppose it's…
oracknows | June 3, 2007I've just found what has to be literally the coolest weblog ever.
Its whole raison d'être is a pet peeve of mine, too, but I literally never thought of starting a blog about it.
oracknows | June 3, 2007I haven't yet mentioned it, but since Friday evening I've been in Chicago for the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting. (If anyone happens to be attending the meeting and is interested in a meetup, let me know. My time's pretty well booked until I leave on Tuesday afternoon, but we might be able to squeeze something in.)
Since my sisters live in Chicago, Friday night I met up with them and we decided to go out to a bar to get some beer and burgers. The bar, on West Division Street in Wicker Park, was Smallbar. I'd never been there before, mainly because the bar didn't exist when I…
oracknows | June 2, 2007I know, I know. Denialism.com and Screw Loose Change already posted this, but it's just such a lovely loony example of the "logic" used by 9/11 conspiracy theorists (a.k.a. "9/11 Truthers") that I couldn't resist posting it too. Here, we see a 9/11 Truther "duplicating" the fall of one of the Twin Towers with stackable plastic in box trays:
The mind boggles. Be sure to watch it to the end. You just won't believe it.
Ah, the power of the scientific method!
oracknows | June 2, 2007Infophilia finds Dr. Michael Egnor's invocation of the Stalin Zombie from a couple of months ago and tears it apart.
Come to think of it, Egnor's been laying down some silliness about evolution lately. I had been restraining myself from commenting due to my previous oversaturation blogging about his antics, but I think I've given the blog a suitably long Egnor-free interval that it might be time to have some dismayed fun with our creationist neurosurgeon again...
oracknows | June 2, 2007Those who still desperately cling to the concept that mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism have been known to write some really stupid stuff trying to justify their position or attack someone else's rebuttal of the whole "hypothesis." This week has produced a bumper crop of such fallacy-laden "defenses" of the thimerosal gravy train--I mean, hypothesis--that two of them are worth a brief mention.
Beware, though: The stupid, it burns.
First up is a guy named Mike Wagnitz, who bills himself as having "over 20 years experience evaluating materials for toxic metals" and currently…
oracknows | June 1, 2007Bummer.
A while back, I asked, "Where's Flea?" The question was asked in response to the mysterious disappearance of his blog a couple of weeks ago, leaving only a blank Blogger blog. Flea, as you may remember, was one of my favorite physician-bloggers. A pediatrician, he consistently provided pithy and interesting commentary on life as a solo practice doctor, his battles with emergency room physicians who don't call him when his patients show up in the ER, and various other issues, not to mention the occasional tussle with antivaccination loons. His disappearance seemed related to a…
oracknows | June 1, 2007Let's face it, energy woo can get boring. It's always "resonance this" and "vibration that," to the point that it all starts to sound the same. Such is the reason that I've become somewhat reluctant to take on more energy woo for Your Friday Dose of Woo. It takes a truly bizarre bit of energy woo to get me interested anymore, and this has me worried that either (1) I'm running out of woo (probably not a problem, as the Woo Folder is still pretty full) or (2) I need to diversify the woo, so to speak. This brings me to a little housekeeping about Your Friday Dose of Woo. It occurs to me that it…
oracknows | May 31, 2007Via Ed Brayton, I've learned of an interesting commentary by Sasha Abramsky on a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Well, its' more like a major pet peeve, one that irritates me so much that two years ago I even created a character who's made regular, albeit increasingly infrequent, appearances on this blog. I'm talking, of course, about the Hitler Zombie, everybody's favorite undead Führer whose chomp on a pundit's brain results in stupid and ridiculously overblown Nazi analogies. Indeed, such analogies irritate me sufficiently that at times my attacks on them have been described by…
oracknows | May 31, 2007I've been a bit remiss when it comes to writing about the lunacy in which it is claimed that vaccines cause autism, allegedly due to the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was in most childhood vaccines until the end of 2002, when it was removed from all but flu vaccines. It turns out that the class action suit by parents who think that vaccines caused their children's autism will be going to court in June. Hearings for this suit, known as the Autism Omnibus, will mark a new phase in the pseudoscientific pursuit of "compensation" for nonexistent "vaccine injuries." Even though…
oracknows | May 30, 2007Here it is, straight from the 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said calendar, culled from a church bulletin listing:
Our youth basketball team is back in action Wednesday at 8 PM in the recreation hall. Come out and watch us kill Christ the King.
My question upon seeing such a notice would, of course, be: Is this a basketball game or a Passion play?
Having been raised Catholic and attended Catholic school for 8 out of 12 years, I can totally envision such a notice being posted in my high school.
oracknows | May 30, 2007I love it.
You see I noticed an old "friend," the Herbinator, making this comment about me regarding dichloroacetate:
I was listening to CBC Radio - the Current, as is my want, and there was a show on about DCA, or Dichloroacetic acid. DCA is a molecule so simple and cheap to make that drug companies are unable to patent it ... so they simply pass on researching it. Some say that DCA is a most excellent and effective cancer treatment.
I have to confess that I had never heard of DCA before. And so I perked an ear toward listening to the radio show as simplicity itself and uppity people…
oracknows | May 29, 2007Last fall, I and quite a few other bloggers wrote about the Tripoli Six. These are six foreign medical workers arrested for allegedly intentionally infecting over 400 children with HIV in a Libyan hospital and, thanks to the ignorant hysteria whipped up against them and the need of the Libyan government to find scapegoats for unhygienic conditions in the hospital, sentenced to death by firing squad, despite allegations that they were tortured while in a Libyan prison to extract "confessions."
Now, five months after their being sentenced to death, the international dance by which Bulgaria and…