oracknows | March 15, 2014Amidst all the sturm und drang after a recent post, I was reminded elsewhere on the blog why I do what I do. So I'm going to do more of it today.
You might recall Liza Cozad, wife of David Lauser, who is the drummer in Sammy Hagar's band. She has an inoperable brain tumor and wants to try Stanislaw Burzynski's antineoplastons. However, because of the partial clinical hold on his clinical trials, she can't get them. Unfortunately, now she and her husband have been using their names to lobby Congress to pressure the FDA to allow an exemption. I wrote a post about this around a month ago. The…
oracknows | March 14, 2014Time to get back to business after yesterday's festivities.
One of the items of Gospel Truth among the "autism biomed" movement, which consists of people who fervently believe that autism is caused by some sort of external "toxin," infection, or vaccines and that subjecting children to various forms of quackery designed either to "detoxify" or reverse whatever physiological derangement believed to be at the root of autism will "recover" these children from autism. Of course, there are a lot of antivaccine believers in the autism biomed movement, and arguably the vast majority of "autism…
oracknows | March 13, 2014If there's a topic that I don't write about much, it's obstetrics. The reason is that it's not a major area of my interest, and it's not an area where I have as much expertise as I do in, say, cancer or even vaccines. My expertise in cancer comes from my career, of course, and my expertise in vaccines is self-taught through my 9+ years of blogging about it. Ditto my expertise in "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), also known as "integrative medicine," about which I know quite a lot now. That's probably why I didn't pay much attention to a study that came out in late January from…
oracknows | March 12, 2014I realize that some of my readers will chide me for saying this, but I usually expect better of Reason. Although I sometimes have a tendency to be a bit—shall we say?—Insolent about libertarians when they pass from a reasonable defense of civil liberties into an Ayn Rand-inspired fantasy world in which the market cures all, useless people keep the supermen (and women) down, and the government is virtually unnecessary, I've usually considered Reason.com to represent a fairly—if you'll excuse the word—reasonable variety of libertarianism. For instance, Ronald Bailey actually once presented…
oracknows | March 10, 2014I forgot if I ever mentioned that I have an article out in the current episode of Skeptical Inquirer about Stanislaw Burzynski. I call it a "primer for skeptics," because that's what it is. So, if you subscribe to SI (Skeptical Inquirer, not Sports Illustrated), read. If not, get thee to a newsstand before it's gone. Thus endeth the plug and beginneth the Insolence.
When last I discussed Stanislaw Burzynski, I noted that, among other things, the state of Texas appears far more interested in putting abortion providers out of business than it does in protecting its citizens suffering from…
oracknows | March 10, 2014Every so often I wonder what the status is regarding the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine. It's something I've been writing about on a regular basis for nine years now, a phenomenon known as "quackademic medicine." It's simultaneously a depressing and energizing topic, energizing because it's something I'm passionate about, but depressing because at times it seems like an unwinnable battle.
Times like now.
What depressed me this time was article that popped up in my feed on Medscape entitled, Do Clinicians Base CAM Recommendations to Patients on Evidence of Efficacy? Since "…
oracknows | March 7, 2014Oh, dear.
I didn't think I'd be writing about that wretched hive of Dunning-Kruger scum and quackery, the most inaptly named website and blog of all time, The Thinking Moms' Revolution (TMR), after having written about it just earlier this week. When last we visited this klatsch of smugly arrogant moms, one of them was bragging about how, if your pediatrician "fires" you because you won't do the responsible thing and vaccinate your children, you should be proud because it means that you've arrived as a "Thinker." And, yes, they do capitalize the word "Thinker" and its variants, such as "…
oracknows | March 6, 2014One of my favorite shows right now is True Detective, an HBO show in which two cops pursue a serial killer over the course of over 16 years. Starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, it's an amazingly creepy show, and McConaughey is amazing at playing his character, Rustin Cohle. I'm sad that the show will be ending this week.
Unfortunately, as much as I like Matthew McConaughey as an actor, he is in part responsible for re-inspiring a movement that has the potential to do profound harm to patients and cancer research. That's because his other big role over the last year has been in…
oracknows | March 5, 2014I don't know if I could be a pediatrician right now.
True, I probably don't have the personality to be a pediatrician, at least not a primary care pediatrician on the front lines. After all, if I did, I probably wouldn't have become a surgeon, much less a hyperspecialized cancer surgeon. One reason (among many, of course) is that I don't have the patience to deal with non-vaccinating parents, particularly parents with massive cases of Dunning-Kruger disease. The same goes for being a pediatric nurse practitioner or nurse, who are also on the front lines in dealing with the antivaccine…
oracknows | March 4, 2014I've mentioned before how Detroit is my hometown. What that means is that I live very near to Canada. In fact, I can go into Windsor pretty much any time I want to, although I don't do it very often. Lots of Canadians work at the cancer center I work at because it's only a few miles from the tunnel to Windsor. That's why I was so disturbed when Ontario proposed letting naturopaths have prescribing privileges. Ultimately, the bill was passed, allowing naturopaths to prescribe actual prescription drugs, although it took three years to hammer out regulations based on the law. Of course,…
oracknows | March 3, 2014
Last week, one of my favorite comedians and filmmakers of all time passed away unexpectedly. I'm referring, of course, to Harold Ramis, whose work ranged from movies like National Lampoon's Animal House (the first R-rated movie I ever saw, actually), to gems like Ghostbusters and and Groundhog Day. In fact, in retrospect, when I posted about Brian Hooker and the antivaccine movement trying to resurrect the hoary corpse of the conspiracy theory that the CDC is some how "covering up" data that would prove that the antivaccine cranks were right all along about mercury in vaccines as a cause…
oracknows | February 27, 2014I've written about conflicts of interest (COIs) a lot over the years. COIs are important in medicine and science because, as much as physicians and scientists like to think that they are immune to such things, we are as human as anyone else. We are just as prone to unconsciously (or consciously) being influenced by self-interest related to our COIs. Most of the time, for purposes of science, COIs are considered to be mostly financial in nature: employment or payments from a drug company, a financial interest in a treatment being studied, and the like. Andrew Wakefield is a classic example in…
oracknows | February 26, 2014Rare is the occasion when I disagree significantly with my collaborator Steve Novella, but this is one of those times. It's a measure of how much we agree on most things that, even in this case, I don't completely disagree with him. But, hey, it happens. I'm referring to Steve's post yesterday in which he gushed over the new policy at PLoS (Public Library of Science) regarding articles published in their journals. (Steve rarely gushes.) Here's the policy:
In an effort to increase access to this data, we are now revising our data-sharing policy for all PLOS journals: authors must make all…
oracknows | February 25, 2014I'm home.
Oh, wait. No. Well, I'm back.
Yes, the grant has been submitted, and I'm ready to get back to my hobby of science, skepticism, and, when necessary, laying down some Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful. And, it figures, too. While I was distracted with meatspace concerns, such as trying to keep my lab from running out of money, a task that's a lot more difficult today than it was ten years ago, the quacks and cranks have been out to play. True, they probably would have been out to play regardless of whether I was available to do what I do best. It just feels as though…
oracknows | February 24, 2014Grant deadlines strike again, and there's no new Insolence for you to peruse today. (The problem with doing real science, as opposed to blogging, is that you actually have to apply endlessly for grant money, and, believe it or not, that comes first, before even Insolence.) Fortunately, I've been made aware of an endless source of entertainment for you, my readers. I've explained before from where I chose the pseudonym "Orac." It was from what was at the time a popular British science fiction series that ran for four years back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Unfortunately, the passage of…
oracknows | February 21, 2014Back in December, I was excited. The reason I was excited was because everybody's favorite über-Libertarian, New World Order conspiracy theorist quack, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger, had made an announcement. That announcement was that on January 6, 2014 Adams would announce astonishing "scientific findings" about food that would "revolutionize" nutrition and health. Given Adams' past history of doing hilariously off-base things with scientific instruments, such as putting Chicken McNuggets under a microscope and being amazed that things look a lot different when highly magnified,…
oracknows | February 19, 2014Remember our old buddy Eric Merola? He's the guy who made two—count 'em—two crappy, conspiracy-laden, misinformation-ridden, astonishingly bad bits of "great man" propaganda disguised as documentaries about a Houston cancer doctor peddling unproven cancer treatments and charging his patients tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being under his care while receiving this magic elixir, known as antineoplastons. Believe it or not, this post is not going to be about Stanislaw Burzynski, although it will be about Eric Merola's latest project.
Over the last several…
oracknows | February 19, 2014The title says it all. I was too beat last night after a hard day in the OR to get the Tarial cells fired up to produce a daily dose of the Insolence you all know and love (or, if you're an antivaccinationist or quack, hate). It happens occasionally, but, fortunately for the universe. not too often. So I guess it means it's open thread time. Oh, and there have been somethings happening that I've meant to comment on but somehow haven't gotten around to, which means I'm probably good for posts for the next few days, but if you think you can catch my attention with something else and knock some…
oracknows | February 18, 2014The vast majority of what is known as "alternative medicine" is quackery. Let's just get that right out front right from the very beginning of this post. That's where I'm coming from, and where I'm coming from is a science- and evidence-based viewpoint. To quote a cliche that is true and modified to my own view of medicine, there is no such thing as "alternative medicine." There is medicine that has been scientifically demonstrated to work. There is medicine that has been scientifically demonstrated not to work. And there is medicine that has not been shown to work. What makes up "alternative…
oracknows | February 16, 2014The last couple of weeks, I've made allusions to the "Bat Signal" (or, as I called it, the "Cancer Signal," although that's a horrible name and I need to think of a better one). Basically, when Bat Cancer Signal goes up (hey, I like that one better, but do bats get cancer?), it means that a study or story has hit the press that demands my attention. It happened again just last week, when stories started hitting the press hot and heavy about a new study of mammography, stories with titles like Vast Study Casts Doubts on Value of Mammograms and Do Mammograms Save Lives? ‘Hardly,’ a New Study…