This is the sort of story that I really hate but feel obligated to discuss. I hate these stories because they usually portend the unnecessary death of a cancer patient, often a child with cancer whose parents refuse chemotherapy or who refuses chemotherapy and is unfortunate enough to have a parent who either has alternative medicine proclivities herself, lacks the guts to tell the child that he's getting treated for his own good and he doesn't have a choice in the matter, or, in a couple of cases that I've discussed, conflates using indigenous people's medicine instead of chemotherapy as a…

I've discussed several times over the last several years my impression that the media have become in general less tolerant of antivaccine views. At least, the media seem less willing to indulge in "tell both sides" false equivalence. Back when I started blogging, I routinely used to bemoan how news stories about vaccines or autism would almost inevitably include obligatory quotes from antivaxer like J.B. Handley, Jenny McCarthy, and sometimes even Andrew Wakefield. More recently, over the last five years or so, such tropes seem a lot less common. I don't have any solid evidence to back up my…

As hard as it is to believe, it was over seven years ago that I started my Annals of "I'm not antivaccine" series. The idea was (and continues to be) to point out how the claim that many antivaccine activists proclaiming themselves to be "not antivaccine" but rather "vaccine safety advocates" is, depending on the specific antivaxer making it, a lie, a delusion, or perhaps both. I do that by simply highlighting bits of over-the-top rhetoric I see on antivaccine websites likening vaccines to all sorts of evil things, particularly the Holocaust. In the case of the very first entry in this series…

Surprisingly, I made it through an entire three day weekend without posting anything to the blog. Believe it or not, this is a good thing. It means that I actually worked on my grant that's due at the end of the week. Still, a blogger's gotta blog; so I can't just shut down until the end of the week. So, hwere we go. I've long lamented the creeping infiltration of quackery into medical academia in which modalities once considered quackery, such as acupuncture, reiki, naturopathy, homeopathy, and various other dubious treatments, have found their way into what should be bastions of science-…

When I first started to take an interest in medical marijuana, I was struck by how much it reminded me of herbalism. Although herbalism is scientifically the most plausible of modalities commonly associated with "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), the use of herbal medicines still involve a number of problems, the biggest of which is what I like to call either the delivery problem or the bioavailability problem. In brief, herbs, when they work, are adulterated drugs. The active ingredient is often a relatively small, embedded in thousands of other constituents that make up herbs,…

I hesitated over discussing this story because it only comes from one source and that source is not one that I normally trust, The Washington Free Beacon. It might be fake news. On the other hand, it is a story that is not implausible and appears to be reasonably well reported, complete with a reproduction of an invitation to the event being reported on. Moreover, even though this particular source is unabashedly conservative and partisan, it has done some reporting that even Nick Baumann at Mother Jones admitted to be pretty good. So it is with a little bit of trepidation that I note this…

As much as I like to deconstruct pseudoscientific claims, particularly about health, medicine, and health care, Sometimes it gets a bit draining. There's just so much pseudoscience, so much credulity, so much sheer idiocy out there that trying to refute them and encourage a more skeptical mindset often feels like pissing into the ocean, for all the effect it has. In the age of fake news and Donald Trump, it even feels as though we're going backward—and not slowly, either. That's why I felt it was time for a bit of a break, a bit more optimism than I've been able to muster before. So it was a…

Last week, I wrote about acupuncture, specifically how acupuncturists are unhappy that the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which provides guidelines for recommended treatments for diseases and conditions, does not recommend acupuncture for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis but does recommend arthroscopic washouts and debridement, for which the evidence is weak. My retort was simple: If this is true, the answer is not for NICE to start recommending quackery like acupuncture, but rather for it to stop recommending conventional medical and surgical treatments with…

Acupiuncture is a system of treatment rooted in the prescientific vitalism of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). It doesn't work. For anything. As Steve Novella and David Colquhoun put it, acupuncture is basically a theatrical placebo, which is why rigorous studies consistently fail to find a treatment effect due to acupuncture that is detectably greater than placebo. Not that that's stopped acupuncturists and acupuncture advocates from trying desperately to show that acupuncture "works," even if it means hooking up acupuncture needles to electrodes and turning it into transcutaneous nerve…

It looks as though the check has finally cleared. You might be wondering what I'm referring to. A little more than a week ago, I took note of how a truly awful survey masquerading as a "study" had risen from the dead once again as two publications in a notorious bottom-feeding predatory "open access" journal after having been retracted after publication in a somewhat less notorious but similarly bottom-feeding predatory "open access" journal. Whether or not these studies were actually retracted the second time around is somewhat unclear. What is known is that they were on the Open Access Text…

After yesterday's post about how antivaxers were utterly losing their mind about an ill-chosen idiom that appeared in a Boston Herald editorial last week. In it, the editor concluded by saying that how antivaxers have been preying on the Somali immigrant population in Minnesota, feeding them antivaccine misinformation that has resulted in two measles outbreaks, one in 2011 and one this year, which is up to 58 victims, a number that continues to climb, should be a "hanging offense." In my post, I emphasized the hypocrisy and disingenuousness of the response of antivaxers, who took an offhand…

Over the last few years, I've been doing a recurring series that I like to refer to as The Annals of "I'm not antivaccine." Amazingly, it's already up to part 23. It's a series based on an oft-repeated antivaccine claim that is either a like or a delusion (sometimes both), namely the claim made by antivaccine activists ranging from Jenny McCarthy to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the latter of whom is best known for making such claims after likening "vaccine-induced autism" to the Holocaust. (Indeed, RFK, Jr. takes denial to a ridiculous extreme by proclaiming himself not just "pro-vaccine" but "…

Of all the modalities of alternative medicine currently in use, arguably acupuncture is the one that has achieved the most mainstream acceptance in medicine. I've often asked why it has become so common in academic medical centers and elsewhere, despite the evidence being overwhelmingly in favor of the conclusion that it is nothing more than a theatrical placebo. It doesn't matter that acupuncture is part of a prescientific system of medicine now known as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), whose concepts are rooted in vitalism. It doesn't matter that what has passed for acupuncture since the…

Normally, I like to mix up my topics, but it's been one of those weeks where basically discussing the antivaccine movement has taken over. Sometimes when that happens, I just go with the flow. Besides, there really is one more story involving that antivaccine movement that I want to comment on. Remember last week, when the story of how the antivaccine movement had targeted Somali immigrants in Minnesota, with a resultant plunge in MMR uptake among that population over the last decade. Completely unsurprisingly, given that MMR uptake among the Somalis fell from 92% to 42% in over a decade,…

Over the last couple of days, I've been writing about two incredibly bad "studies" by Anthony Mawson, an antivaccinationist and Andrew Wakefield fanboi, who first published one of them in a bottom-feeding predatory open access journal and saw it retracted. Then he appears to have divided the study up two minimal publishable units and had them published as two papers in a bottom-feeding predatory open access journal even lower on the food chain that the first, after having promoted its second coming among the antivaccine crowd. Obviously, I'm not going to go into the details of each study's…

[Editorial update: I woke up this morning to find out that the answer to my question in the title is almost certainly yes. The post has been quickly altered to reflect that. See below.] Believe it or not, I overlooked something in yesterday's post about a putrefying, rotting mess of a "vaccinated versus unvaccinated" study carried out by an Andrew Wakefield fanboi named Anthony Mawson that purported to have found that vaccinated children have a much higher prevalence of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) and and diseases not preventable by vaccines than unvaccinated children. I'll refer you…

Some posts I really enjoy doing. I'm so fired up by the topic that the words flow, and I finish a post in record time. Other posts are more of a chore, written not so much because I'm excited by the topic, but because I feel duty bound to address it. I feel the need to write such posts when, for example, a bit of pseudoscience has gained traction in mainstream groups and readers keep writing me about it, to the point where I finally give in. This is one of the latter posts. None of this is to say that I don't still do my best with these posts to explain and argue my points. Fear not, I'll get…

Earlier this week, I took note of an ongoing measles outbreak in Minnesota. This outbreak affects the large Somali immigrant community there, and the reason for the outbreak is simple. Over the last decade, uptake of the MMR vaccine has plunged dramatically in the American-born children of the Somali community, from 92% to 42%, far below the level necessary for herd immunity. The reason for the drop is that antivaccine fear mongering has taken hold in the community, thanks to American antivaxers who targeted the community and Andrew Wakefield himself, who's visited the community at least…

I'm having flashbacks now. I feel as though it's 2012, and I was just in the midst of examining the Houston cancer quack known as Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. As you recall, he's the Polish expat doctor who discovered peptides in the blood that he dubbed "antineoplastons" and postulated to be endogenous cancer suppressors. He ultimately made them into a cancer treatment that he's been using on patients for over 40 years now, despite never having demonstrated its efficacy or safety. Despite that, he's become a rock star in the world of alternative cancer cures, with two propaganda movies disguised…

[Editor's note: Sorry this is a few hours late. I forgot to change the status from DRAFT to SCHEDULE in WordPress last night. D'oh!] The single most persuasive strategies by which quacks sell their wares and believers in quackery persuade others to try the quackery they believe in is the personal anecdote. Indeed, I established very early on in the history of this blog a type of post that has become a staple that shows up several times a year. In these posts, I deconstruct "alternative cancer cure" testimonials, showing how the story as related doesn't provide convincing evidence that the…