oracknows | April 7, 2015Early on in its history, I wasn't particularly thrilled with Wikipedia as a project or reference source. To put it mildly, I viewed the very concept behind the project with a great deal of skepticism, some of which was voiced nine years ago when a medical Wikipedia was proposed. In particular, the fact that anyone could become an editor and edit articles seemed to me to be a recipe for disaster. After all, it's the cranks and pseudoscientists who have a lot more time on their hands to edit than most experts, and they tend to be far more passionate about their favorite pseudoscience or…
oracknows | April 5, 2015Recent articles in The Daily Mail and The Australian reminded me that it's been over a month since the unfortunate demise of Jess Ainscough, a young Australian woman who was diagnosed with an epithelioid sarcoma of her left upper extremity in 2008. Before I get to the articles, a brief recap is in order.
This is a very rare tumor that is generally slow growing but relentless, with most untreated patients dying within 10 years, although with radical surgery and complete removal of all tumor deposits it is possible to produce ten year survivals on the order of 49-72%, closer to 72% for young…
oracknows | April 3, 2015Why, oh why, did I look at GreenMedInfo again?
You remember GreenMedInfo? It's yet another wretched hive of scum and quackery, but with a twist. Its proprietor, Sayer Ji, thinks he's an expert at interpreting the biomedical literature. Unfortunately, as he demonstrates time and time again with depressing regularity, he is nothing of the sort. In reality, what Ji is an expert at is cherry picking medical studies and torturing them until they confess agreement with whatever quack idea he's currently espousing. In the wake of the news coverage of Angelina Jolie's decision to have her ovaries…
oracknows | April 1, 2015It's no secret that I don't have a high opinion of naturopathy. Just enter the word "naturopathy" into the search box of this blog, and you'll quickly see what I mean. Indeed, when last I mentioned the topic a couple of weeks ago, I was discussing the revelations of Britt Marie Hermes, a former naturopath who realized what a load of pseudoscientific quackery she had bought into, unfortunately, after having finished naturopathy school with a quarter million dollars of debt and having practiced for a while. Her account confirmed my impression of naturopathy as a veritable cornucopia of quackery…
oracknows | March 30, 2015As I sat on my couch last night, laptop sitting in front of me, I awaited the Ken Burns adaptation of Siddartha Mukherjee's excellent book The Emperor of All Maladies into a three part television documentary to air on PBS. I'm not sure whether I'll blog the show or not, but if I do I'll probably wait until all three episodes have aired. In the meantime, this seems as good a time as any to go back to a story that I saw a week ago but somehow, thanks to grants, traveling to Houston, and other distractions that I wanted to blog about more, never got around to. Since The Emperor of All Maladies,…
oracknows | March 30, 2015As I write this, I'm kind of beat.
The reason for this is simple. Traveling sucks the energy out of me, and I just got back from almost four days in Houston for the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) meeting. Yes, I was a mere dozen (at most) miles from that Heart of Darkness known as the Burzynski Clinic for a few days, and I didn't even succumb to the temptation to catch a cab out there and take a selfie with the Burzynski Clinic in the background. Part of the reason was that it would just be more expense than it's worth. The other part of the reason is that it would be a bit hard to…
oracknows | March 27, 2015Homeopathy is quackery. It can't be repeated often enough.
Homeopathy is The One Quackery To Rule Them All. It is based on prescientific vitalism and principles so addled that one must wonder whether Samuel Hahnemann, the guy who dreamt up this medical system, was a fan of excess alcohol use, opium, marijuana, or some unholy combination of the these. Think about it. The first principle of homeopathy is the law of similars, which states that like cures like. In other words, to relieve a symptom, homeopathy tells us, you must use something that causes that symptom in healthy people. There is no…
oracknows | March 26, 2015I happen to be in Houston right now attending the Society of Surgical Oncology annual meeting. Sadly, I'm only about 12 miles away from the lair of everybody's favorite faux clinical researcher and purveyor of a cancer cure that isn't, Stanislaw Burzynski. Such is life. In any case, this conference is all about cancer and how we treat it surgically. That includes prophylactic surgery designed to prevent cancer in people at very high risk. Prophylactic surgery to prevent cancer is never a decision that should be undertaken lightly and almost never is, rants from quacks notwithstanding that…
oracknows | March 25, 2015It's been a while since I discussed medical marijuana, even though it's a topic I've been meaning to come back to since I first dubbed medical marijuana to be the equivalent of herbalism and discussed how the potential of cannabinoids to treat cancer has been, thus far, unimpressive, with relatively modest antitumor effects. The reason I refer to medical marijuana as the "new herbalism" is because the arguments made in favor of medical marijuana are very much like arguments for herbalism, including arguments that using the natural plant is superior to using specific purified cannabinoids,…
oracknows | March 24, 2015Two things have reminded me that it's been a while since I've written about Stanislaw Burzynski, nearly five months, to be precise. First, on Wednesday evening I'll be heading to the city where Burzynski preys on unsuspecting cancer patients, Houston, TX, to attend this year's Society of Surgical Oncology meeting to imbibe the latest research on—of course!—surgical oncology. (If you'll be attending the meeting, look me up. If you're in Houston and want to have a meetup, I might be able to pull it off.) Second, you, my readers, have been telling me there's something I need to blog about. This…
oracknows | March 23, 2015There are some antivaccine lies that just never die. Well, actually, most of them are very much like Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddy Krueger in that, just when you think you've killed them at the end of the latest confrontation, they always come back. Always. As an example of this, let's go back four months ago. Remember back in November when I discussed a particularly pernicious antivaccine lie that's been spread by Kenyan Catholic Bishops and the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association? It was the claim that the tetanus vaccine used to prevent neonatal tetanus in young women in Kenya…
oracknows | March 20, 2015Yesterday, I laid a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence on a hapless—not to mention clueless—tech writer who for some reason wrote an article for the New York Times Styles section. The writer, Nick Bilton, surely deserved it. His article served up a massive pile of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about radiation from cell phones as a cause of cancer. His twist was to take advantage of the current hype over the recently announced Apple Watch to turn that FUD onto the Apple Watch and other gadgets that fall under the title of "wearable tech" using misinterpretations of studies…
oracknows | March 18, 2015The New York Times Styles Section giveth. The New York Times Styles Section taketh away.
Last week, The NYT Styles Section published an excellent deconstruction of the pseudoscientific activities of Vani Hari, a.k.a. The Food Babe, by Courtney Rubin. Although skeptics might think that it was a tad too "balanced" (as did I), by and large we understand that this was the NYT Style section, and seeing a full-throated skeptical deconstruction of The Food Babe's antics in such a venue is just not in the cards. That's what I'm there for (not to mention other skeptics like Steve Novella), such as…
In which a certain box of blinky lights is published in Slate.com pontificating about Prince Charles
oracknows | March 18, 2015After a busy and late day yesterday, I didn't have any gas left in the tank, if you know what I mean, to produce Insolence as epic as my posts about The Food Babe and cries of antivaccine activists of "Help, help! I'm being repressed!" Or maybe I should say that Orac's power supply is drained and his Tarial cells need recharging.
Sometimes, however, serendipity happens. As you might have seen in the news, everybody's favorite Quacktitioner Royal (His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales) is in the United States for a visit. I wrote about it last month, and—miracle of miracles!—someone at Slate…
oracknows | March 17, 2015To put it mildly, I'm not a big fan of Vani Hari, who has achieved Internet notoriety as a highly misguided "food activist" better known as The Food Babe. As The Food Babe, Hari has improbably become a minor celebrity by attacking food companies over various ingredients their products and, unfortunately, seems poised for more. Indeed, given how media- and social media-savvy she has become, it's not inconceivable that she could become the Dr. Oz of food. The problem with that, of course, is that what she pushes is not good information but rather misinformation. Indeed, she appears to live by…
oracknows | March 16, 2015I've been writing a lot of posts on what I like to call the "antivaccine dogwhistle." In politics, a "dog whistle" refers to rhetoric that sounds to the average person to be reasonable and even admirable but, like the way that a dog whistle can't be heard by humans because the frequency of its tone is higher than the range that humans can hear, most people don't "hear" the real message. However, the intended audience does hear the real message. The way the "dog whistle" works in politics is through the use of coded language recognizable to the intended audience but to which most other people…
oracknows | March 13, 2015Naturopathy is 80% quackery, 19% science-based modalities like diet, exercise, and lifestyle changes rebranded and infused with woo, and maybe 1% valid medicine. Yes, I know I'm probably being generous given that naturopathy is based on a vitalistic, prescientific worldview and originated in the 19th century German "natural living" movement, but I'm in a generous mood right now. The reason I'm in a generous mood is not because naturopathy has suddenly become less quackery than it was. Just view a few of my posts on naturopathy if you think my opinion's changed. I still believe that…
oracknows | March 12, 2015How quickly things change.
If there's one thing I always feel obligated to warn my fellow pro-science advocates about vaccines and the antivaccine movement, it's that we can never rest on our laurels or assume that the tide is turning in our direction. The reason is simple: Antivaccinationism is a powerful belief system, every bit as powerful as religion and political ideology. It's powerful not just among antivaccinationists, but also because it taps into belief systems that are very much part and parcel of being an American. In fact, depressingly, yesterday I learned of a perfect example of…
oracknows | March 10, 2015Anyone who's read this blog knows my opinion of Mike Adams, the proprietor of the quack website known as NaturalNews.com. It is not favorable, to put it mildly. All you have to do to realize that is to type his name into the search box of this blog and see what comes up: Anger at his attacks on celebrities who have died of cancer; mockery of his pretending to be a scientist and attacking Jimmy Kimmel for "hate speech" about vaccines; alarm at his threats delivered with somewhat plausible deniability against scientists; further alarm at his "natural biopreparedness" and homeopathy for Ebola;…
oracknows | March 10, 2015The human mind is amazing in its ability to compartmentalize. Many are the times when I've come across people who seem reasonable in every other way but who cling tightly to one form of pseudoscience or another. On the other hand, as I've noticed time and time again, people whose minds have a proclivity for pseudoscience tend not to limit themselves to just one form of pseudoscience. Indeed, my surgical and skeptical bud Mark Hoofnagle coined a term for this latter phenomenon, namely "crank magnetism." It's basically a pithy term to describe how people who are into one form of pseudoscience…