oracknows | June 5, 2014Quacks really hate Wikipedia.
It's understandable, really. Wikipedia has some fairly tight standards regulating its form and content. Quacks, thinking that because anybody can edit Wikipedia articles it must mean that they can edit the entries on their favorite bit of woo to their hearts' content in order to make it look more scientifically supported and to remove disconfirming information, are disappointed when they discover that it's not that easy. Now, I've been a critic of Wikipedia in the past, having found problems in entries on topics where I have deep knowledge and been concerned that…
oracknows | June 4, 2014Not surprisingly, being a guy who leans mildly left, I like The Daily Show. Jon Stewart and his writers are incredibly adept at skewering all manner of bovine excrement, be it political, scientific, or otherwise. In particular, the way Stewart and company skewered the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) for its promotion of the chemical industry. Indeed, Samantha Bee, who did the infamous Little Crop of Horrors segment that mocked ACSH for its defense of pesticides über alles and its criticism of Michelle Obama's healthy eating initiative.
Another Daily Show segment by Samantha Bee…
oracknows | June 3, 2014
It's always jarring when I go to a scientific meeting, in this case the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting, imbibe the latest clinical science on cancer, and then check back to see what the quacks are doing. On the other hand, there was a session at this year's ASCO on "integrative oncology" (stay tuned for an...Insolent...discussion of it sometime in the next few days after I get a chance to watch the videos again and look up the papers cited in support of woo), so maybe it isn't as jarring as it once was to come back into the real world.
Thus I saw in my Google Alerts…
oracknows | June 2, 2014I happen to be out of town right now, attending the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago. It's been a more—shall we say?—eventful trip than anticipated, which is why at my not-so-super-secret other blog we have a guest post today and here I will (probably) be shorter than usual. I'm not really going to say much about what I mean by "more eventful than usual," because it's more personal than anything else. Suffice to say that it kept me from delivering the usual logorrhea. Well, the unexpected event plus spending the day visiting my sister and my nephews, one…
oracknows | May 29, 2014I'm a bit torn today. On the one hand, it makes me cringe when pundits write inflammatory articles blaming Jenny McCarthy for measles outbreaks. Yes, I know that I once did the same thing myself, but, as much as antivaccinationists dislike me, I've actually toned it down a bit when it comes to that particular line of attack, having learned that it is important not to overstate the pro-science case or risk making errors of fact that antivaccinationists can jump all over in order to try to discredit arguments against them. On the other hand, it can't be denied that declining vaccination rates…
oracknows | May 28, 2014
Being a cancer surgeon, I realize that my tendency is to view my blogging material through the prism of cancer, particularly breast cancer, my specialty. it's easy to forget that there are diseases every bit as horrible, some arguably even more so than the worst cancer. When I think of such diseases, it's not surprising that amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease after its most famous victim. It's a progressive degenerative neurologic disease that affects the motor neurons, resulting in progressive muscle weakness throughout the body. Eventually, victims…
oracknows | May 28, 2014Although I'm a translational researcher, I'm also a surgeon. That was my first and primary training and only later did I decide to get my PhD during my residency, when the opportunity to do so with a decent stipend presented itself. From my perspective, clinical research in surgery is difficult, arguably more difficult than it is for other medical modalities, at least in some ways. For instance, in surgery, it usually very difficult to do a double-blind placebo-controlled trial. For one thing, doing "sham" surgery on patients in the placebo arm is ethically dicey, and it's very hard to…
oracknows | May 26, 2014Of all the clueless antivaccinationist out there, one stands out as being particularly dangerous to public health. That person is the antivaccine reporter whom I've periodically been forced to castigate ever since around 2007 when she laid down such a seethingly hot bit of napalm-grade antivaccine stupid that she grabbed my attention with her combination of ignorance and arrogance (a.k.a., the arrogance of ignorance or the Dunning-Kruger effect), Sharyl Attkisson. Since then, Attkisson has managed to get on my radar through her sucking up to Andrew Wakefield, playing footsie with the…
oracknows | May 26, 2014Regular readers might be wondering why my output was—shall we say?—less extensive last week than it usually is. I even skipped a weekday and then followed it up with a recycled post from my not-so-super-secret other blog, altered to be a bit more, yes, Insolent. The answer is a single word: Grants. I had a grant deadline. That's basically past now. However, today is a holiday, and, besides taking some time to pay tribute to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, I also plan on taking a day off from full-scale blogging as well. Fortunately, there are a couple of links to…
oracknows | May 22, 2014
Pretty much everyone who's gotten through junior high recognizes the line from the William Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet says, "What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title." It's a succinct contemplation of how much a name means, which, according to Juliet, isn't that much. She (and Shakespeare) were right then, and the same thing is still true. In particular, it's true when referring to things perhaps less appealing than young love…
oracknows | May 21, 2014Well, it snuck up on me again, the way it has a tendency to do every year. Maybe it's because Memorial Day is so early this year. Maybe it's because there's just so much work to do this week given the multiple grant deadlines. Whatever the case, it just dawned on my last night that today is the first day of the yearly autism quackfest known as AutismOne (AO), which is being held at the Intercontinental O'Hare Hotel near Chicago. Of course, things are different this year. Given the schism between team Crosby and pretty much everyone else in the antivaccine movement, it's unclear what the deal…
oracknows | May 19, 2014May I just say something again? (Actually, it's my blog; so I'll say it if I want to regardless of whether you want me to or not.) You know that "hypothesis" that vaccines cause autism, the one that has been at the core of the modern antivaccine movement over the last 15 years or so? Well, it's not pining for the fjords, if you know what I mean. No it's not pinin'! It's passed on! This "hypothesis" is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet it's maker! (Well, actually, since one of its makers, Andrew Wakefield, is still around, I'm not sure what in practice that actually…
oracknows | May 18, 2014I hadn't really planned on writing again about everyone's favorite conspiracy theorist and promoter of quackery, Mike Adams, at least not so soon after the last time I did it, which was only last week after Adams appeared on Dr. Oz's daytime television show to push his "laboratory." Adams, as you might recall, goes by the Internet moniker the "Health Ranger" (which would really more appropriately be "Health Danger") and is the man responsible for one of the quackiest sites on the Internet, NaturalNews.com, a repository for nearly every form of medical pseudoscience known to humans, mixed in…
oracknows | May 16, 2014As seems to happen more frequently, Orac has had his attention wholly taken up by contemplating a black hole. (Actually, he's at a medical conference on quality care in breast cancer.) Consequently, after a four and a half hour drive to the hotel, dinner out with the conference staff, and preparing for his talk, he didn't have time to deliver the Insolence you all know and crave. So he's asking you—yes, you!—to create your own Insolence. That's right. It's open thread day, although I do want there to be a bit of guidance. Are there any particular topics or targets deserving of Orac's loving…
oracknows | May 15, 2014Over the years, the criticism of "evidence-based medicine" (EBM) that I have repeated here and that I and others have repeated at my not-so-super-secret other blog is that its levels of evidence relegate basic science considerations to the lowest level evidence and elevate randomized clinical trial evidence to the highest rung, in essence fetishizing it above all, a form of thinking that I like to call methodolatry. Now, when EBM works correctly, this is not an entirely unreasonable way to look at things. After all, we just want to know what works in patients. Basically, when EBM is working…
oracknows | May 14, 2014Sometimes, when you're blogging, serendipity strikes. Sometimes this takes the form of having something appear related to something you just blogged about. Yesterday, I discussed one of the biggest supporters of quackery on the Internet, Mike Adams, a.k.a. the Health Ranger, proprietor of NaturalNews.com, one of the quackiest, if not the quackiest site, on the Internet, NaturalNews.com. This time around, I was simply using one of Adams' wonderfully incoherent defenses of alternative medicine thinking to demonstrate how much magical thinking exists at the core of alternative medicine and how…
oracknows | May 12, 2014Over the years, I've often likened alternative medicine to a religion—or even a cult. Basically, it requires belief in a set of precepts that have at best little and more commonly no evidence to support them that is often accompanied by magical thinking that a god-substitute, be it nature, one's body, or, of course, the magically mysterious "quantum," possesses magical powers that will protect one from all harm if one simply believes and acts on that belief. The belief systems that undergird various forms of alternative medicine are every bit as ridiculous from a scientific viewpoint as the…
oracknows | May 11, 2014Besides yesterday being Mothers' Day yesterday, I had a lot of grant stuff to do, which means that this one will be a quickie. On Saturday, a reader sent me a link to one of the most useful sites I've ever encountered. I realize that over the weekend it's spread around the skeptical blogosphere like the proverbial wildfire, which is unfortunate (for me) given that I've made it a personal rule that I don't post on the weekend any more, barring amazing developments. Still, this one tempted me. It's a website called Spurious Correlations, and it is exactly what it claims to be. Its usefulness…
oracknows | May 9, 2014
There's a certain category of posts that I like to call (to myself, anyway) "taking care of business" posts. Usually, it's a post about something that I missed the first time around but has, for some reason, reappeared on my radar screen or something that I wish I had written about when it first showed up but didn't to the point that I don't care that the material is over a week old, which, let's face it, might as well be a year old in blogging time. On the other hand, there's still no time like the present, so let's take care of some business. There is the added benefit that taking care…
oracknows | May 8, 2014One of the themes of this blog since the very beginning of this blog is the threat to scientific medicine represented by a phenomenon that I like to call quackademic medicine. Although I did not coin the term, I frequently use the term and have done my best to popularize it among skeptics to describe the infiltration of pseudoscience into academic medicine, be it in the form of fellowships, research and clinical trials studying prescientific magic like homeopathy or "energy medicine," or even the offering of such services under the auspices of an academic medical center, thus putting the…