oracknows | January 11, 2015
Now that we're solidly into 2015, it's a good time to check in on what the legislative priorities are going to be among various advocates of quackery and "health freedom" (but I repeat myself). There's a new Republican Congress, and a lot of chairmanships are going to be reshuffled, with various legislators finding themselves in control of important Congressional committees. Fortunately for us, one of the major promoters of "health freedom" (or, as I like to call it, the freedom of quacks from pesky government laws and regulations), has laid out exactly what its priorities are for 2015.…
oracknows | January 9, 2015
You wanted it. You've been pestering me about it for days now. So now you've got it. You might be surprised at what I say about it though.
I realize that I've written time and time again about children with cancer who refuse chemotherapy in favor of quackery. It's been one of the recurring story types that I've blogged about because, depressingly, such stories are not uncommon. It began with Katie Wernecke and Abraham Cherrix several years ago, the latter of whom is still around but was continuing to battle recurrences of his Hodgkin's lymphoma when last we revisited his case nearly two…
oracknows | January 8, 2015
So here it is, already a week into 2015. Truth be told, I'm still finding myself having a hard time believing that it's already 2015, but then I say that about every year in early January. Be that as it may, I've already seen one hopeful sign that it could be a decent year when it comes to science refuting claims of the antivaccine movement. In fact, there's already been a study that once again fails to find even a hint of a whiff of a whisper of evidence for a link between vaccines and autism. It comes in the form of a study from Japan published online in Vaccine on January 3 (which, oddly…
oracknows | January 6, 2015
Readers who've been following this blog a while would probably not be surprised to learn that one of my all time favorite movies is Ghostbusters. In fact, it's hard to believe that the movie is now 30 years old. It makes me feel so old, given that I saw the movie in the theater when it came out. Be that as it may, there's a scene near the end of the movie, where an ancient god Gozer the Gozarian, takes the form of a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, tromping through New York City destroying things, all thanks to a stray thought by Ghostbuster Ray Stantz (played by Dan Ackroyd) that inspired…
oracknows | January 5, 2015The holidays must truly be over. I say this because, starting around Sunday, the drumbeat of blogging topics that I haven't covered but that apparently you, my readers, want me to cover has accelerated. However, before I can move on to what might or might not be greener blogging pastures, material-wise, I feel obligated to finish what I started yesterday, namely the deconstruction of an advertising supplement promoting the "integration" of "traditional medicine" (in particular, traditional Chinese medicine, a.k.a. TCM) for which Science and the American Association for the Advancement of…
oracknows | January 5, 2015
NOTE: There is a follow up to this post.
The holidays are over. Time to start dishing out fresh Insolence, Respectful and, as appropriate, not-so-Respectful for 2015.
I do, however, feel obligated to deal with one painfully inappropriate action by a major science journal left over from 2014. It happened in an issue that came out just before Christmas, and, with all the festivities, being on call last week, and having houseguests; so, unfortunately, I just didn't get around to addressing it, either here or on my not-so-super-secret other blog (where I might crosspost this later in the week).…
oracknows | January 2, 2015
Seven years ago I returned to Michigan, where I was born and spent the first quarter century of my life, after an absence of more than 20 years. In the interim, I had done my surgical residency and earned my PhD in Cleveland, a surgical oncology fellowship in Chicago, and worked in New Jersey at my first academic job for eight and a half years. Then I was lured back with a job in Detroit. One of the odd things about this return after such a long absence was the culture shock, how much I had forgotten about the Detroit area. One of those things that I had forgotten is just how crazy about…
oracknows | December 31, 2014She's baa-aack.
Remember Stephanie Seneff? When last Orac discussed her, she had been caught dumpster diving into the VAERS database in order to torture the data to make it confess a "link" between aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and acetaminophen and—you guessed it!—autism. It was a bad paper in a bad journal known as Entropy that I deconstructed in detail around two years ago. As I said at the time, I hadn't seen a "review" article that long and that badly done since the even more horrible article by Helen Ratajczak entitled Theoretical aspects of autism: Causes–A review (which, not…
oracknows | December 30, 2014
Ever since moving back to the Detroit area nearly seven years ago, one thing I've noticed is a propensity for our local news outlets to go full pseudoscience from time to time. I'm not sure why, other than perhaps that it attracts eyeballs to the screen, but, in reality, most of these plunges into pseudoscience and quackery are so poorly done that I find it hard to believe that even believers find them interesting. For example, back in 2008, I discussed a particularly dumb story aired by our local NBC affiliate WDIV entitled Orbs: Myth or Real?, which, not having started my new job yet, I…
oracknows | December 29, 2014
Christmas is over, and we're in that weird time between Christmas and New Years Day, when, usually at least, I have to work but so many people are out and so few patients seem to want to come in that it hardly seems worth the effort. So it is with the blog, too. The week between Christmas and New Years tends to be the lowest traffic period of the year. Although that's been true this year as well, I've noticed more commenting activity than I usually see. So, I figured, what the heck? There are odds and ends worth writing about, although I don't plan on doing an epic posts before next Monday…
oracknows | December 26, 2014
After I woke up this morning, the haze induced by feasting and hanging out with family only slowly clearing, I debated about whether I wanted to post anything at all today. After all, in much of the English-speaking world, it's still a holiday, Boxing Day. Although not an official holiday here in the US, when Christmas is on a Thursday, as it was this year, Boxing Day becomes an unofficial holiday that the majority of people not working in the retail sector seem to take off, the better to produce a four or five day weekend, depending upon whether they took Christmas Eve off as well. Also, it…
oracknows | December 24, 2014
As Orac takes a couple of days to commune with family (as amazing as it is, yes, a Plexiglass box of blinking colored lights has a family) and celebrate the season, here's a lost Christmas gem from Deepak Chopra, who interprets Charles Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol. Unfortunately, embedding is disabled; so you'll have to click on this link. You will, however, appreciate the quantum woo man's message of Christmas cheer.
Merry Christmas!
oracknows | December 23, 2014
Having recently discovered a veritable Library with Doctor Moon of antivaccine misinformation and quackery known as Modern Alternative Mama's blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and YouTube channel, I couldn't resist taking one more drought from the same well. It is, after all, almost Christmas, and truly, as far as the blog is concerned, the discovery of Kate Tietje, a.k.a. Modern Alternative Mama, was an early Christmas gift that could not but be opened immediately. Besides, with Christmas coming up in a couple of days, after today I plan on taking a brief blog break until Friday, with…
oracknows | December 22, 2014
One of the depressing things about having dedicated over a decade of one's life to combatting pseudoscience and quackery is that, no matter how much I think I've come to be familiar with all the woo that can be out there and all the players promoting that woo, there are always new people popping up. It's impossible for one person to keep track of them all. Sometimes, however, there are, for example, antivaccine activists that I haven't heard of before whom I really think I should have heard of sooner than this. Such is the case with Kate Tietje, who blogs at Modern Alternative Mama.…
oracknows | December 18, 2014
With the way our dysfunctional federal government works, it's not uncommon for the end of a fiscal year to come and go without there being a budget for the next fiscal year in place. This phenomenon is particularly common during election years, and this year was no different. September 30 came and went, followed by the beginning of FY2015 on October 1 with no budget in place, just a continuing resolution. Finally, this week, Congress acted and passed a budget, but, as is often the case given that the President does not have line item veto power, the omnibus spending bill funding the…
oracknows | December 17, 2014
I've written quite a few times, both here and elsewhere, about the sham that is known as "traditional Chinese medicine" (TCM). Basically, there is no such thing as TCM per se. There were in the distant past many "traditional Chinese medicines," various folk medicine traditions that, contrary to what is taught now, did not form a cohesive system of medicine that worked. Then, in the 1940s and 1950s, Chairman Mao Zedong, unable to provide "Western" science-based medicine to all of his people, popularized Chinese folk medicine as "traditional Chinese medicine" and exported it to the world…
oracknows | December 16, 2014
Not being Australian and, for some reason, never having encountered her promotion of "natural health" online before, I first encountered Jessica Ainscough, also known as "The Wellness Warrior" over a year ago when I learned that her mother Sharyn Ainscough had died of breast cancer. Her mother, it turns out, had rejected conventional treatment for her breast cancer and chosen instead the quackery known as Gerson therapy. It's a treatment regimen based on long-discredited view of how cancer forms and that requires the consumption of boatloads of supplements and the administration multiple…
oracknows | December 15, 2014
Wow. I guess time really does fly when you're having fun. In fact, it flies so fast that I don't even notice when a major anniversary (or, if you will, blogiversary).
Remember how I've been mentioning that I can't believe it's been almost ten years since I started doing this? I've been droppoing these little remarks here and there over the last few months not out of any sort of plan, but rather because I really couldn't believe that I had been at this almost ten years. In fact, I couldn't believe it so much that I actually missed my tenth blogiversary.
No, seriously. I really did. It was…
oracknows | December 12, 2014
After yesterday's post on the depressingly high (and increasing, apparently) rate of personal belief exemptions to vaccination requirements for entering school in the state of Michigan, I felt the need to pontificate a bit further. The reason is that MLive.com has posted some followup stories. Also, I didn't have a lot of time last night to write because I had the pleasure of attending the CFI-Michigan Solstice dinner to hang out with fellow skeptics and heathens. Unfortunately, the topic of the high exemption levels in Michigan came up.
First up on the follow up story parade is one…
oracknows | December 10, 2014
One aspect of my life that's kind of strange is how I've basically ended up back where I started. I was born and raised in southeast Michigan (born in the city of Detroit, actually, although my parents moved to the suburbs when I was 10). After going to college and medical school at the University of Michigan, I matched at a residency in Cleveland (regular readers know that it was Case Western Reserve University), and then did a fellowship in surgical oncology at the University of Chicago. Finally, I ended up taking my first "real" (i.e., faculty) job at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey…