oracknows | December 18, 2013Rats.
Everyone's blogging about all the studies showing (as if it needed to be shown yet again) that vitamin supplementation is not necessary for most people, nor does it decrease the risk of heart disease or cancer, and I can't, at least not yet. Why not? Because my friggin' university doesn't subscribe to the Annals of Internal Medicine! I know! Can you believe it? And, you, my regular readers, know that I never blog a study (or three studies) without having the actual studies in front of me. Abstracts alone, as I've shown time and time again, can be deceiving. So, until one of my partners…
oracknows | December 17, 2013Whoa.
How did I miss this? Maybe it was all the other stuff going on last week, such as the Sarah Hershberger case, multiple updates on Stanislaw Burzynski, and Katie Couric's sort-of apology about her awful segment on HPV vaccines. So much stuff was going on that I forgot that December 11 was my nine year blogiversary.
Yes, nine years ago on that day, the wonder (or at least obnoxiousness) that was Orac was born (or at least stolen from an obscure 30 year old British SF show). Since I was so exhausted last night that I fell asleep on the couch with my wife and my dog, I figure I might as…
oracknows | December 16, 2013These days, Dr. Oz seems to stand for everything I oppose in medicine: Fear mongering, quackery, making claims that he can't back up with science, and, of course, filthy lucre. On second thought, I'm not against filthy lucre per se. In fact, I wouldn't mind having some of it myself. However, I also want to keep my integrity, and if getting a piece of that filthy lucre involves compromising myself, my scientific credibility, and my overall credibility as much as Dr. Mehmet Oz has done over the last several years, I'll have to settle for my comfortable upper middle class existence. It's not so…
oracknows | December 13, 2013Thanks, Daily Kos.
Well, not really. You'll see why in a minute, but first here's the background. There's a general impression out there that the political right is associated with the antiscience that includes anthropogenic global warming denialism, denial of evolution, and denial of aspects of reproductive biology that don't jibe with their religious beliefs, and that consensus while the political left's brand of antiscience includes antivaccine beliefs and fear mongering about genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Of course, as I've discussed many times before, it's more complicated than…
oracknows | December 11, 2013The central mystery of Stanislaw Burzynski is how he keeps managing, no matter what is thrown at him by state and federal medical authorities, to keep on treating patients with deadly cancers. He's like the Energizer Bunny; he just keeps going and going and going and going. Or maybe he's like the game Whac-A-Mole™, where, as soon as one strategy seems on the verge of shutting him down he pops up elsewhere with another angle.
Burzynski, as regular readers know, is the Houston doctor (I refuse to call him a cancer doctor, because he has no formal training in oncology or even board certification…
oracknows | December 10, 2013Vaccines against the human papilloma virus (HPV), such as Gardasil and Cervarix, seem to have a strange power over people who are otherwise reasonable about science and vaccines. For some reason, HPV vaccines seem to have an uncanny ability to turn such people into raging antivaccinationists almost as loony as the merry band of antivaccine loons over at Age of Autism. At the very least, they seem to make seemingly reasonable people susceptible to blandishments and tropes for which they'd normally otherwise never fall. Truly, Gardasil and Cervarix seem to be vaccines that make reasonable…
oracknows | December 9, 2013Three weeks ago, USA TODAY published an expose of the Burzynski Clinic by Liz Szabo that was devastating in its scope and detail. Early on, Stanislaw Burzynski and his minions tried to do some damage control, with hilarious results given how inept and unconvincing his excuses were for all the violations of ethics and patient care and abuse of clinical trials detailed by Szabo. Later, Burzynski presented some abstracts at the Society of Neuro-Oncology meeting in San Francisco. Let's just say that the case report and his reports of a phase 2 clinical trial were...similarly unimpressive. Overall…
oracknows | December 8, 2013I am afraid. I am afraid that the Amish girl with cancer whose parents' battle to treat her with "natural" therapy instead of effective science-based chemotherapy has made international news, is doomed. It might take longer than doctors have estimated, but it seems inevitable now. I will explain.
It's hard to believe that it's been two months since I first became aware of the case of Sarah Hershberger, the now 11-year-old Amish girl from Medina County, Ohio near Akron with lymphoblastic lymphoma whose parents stopped her chemotherapy after only two rounds. It was around that time that, after…
oracknows | December 6, 2013Well, wouldn't you know it? Mike Adams thinks he's an actual scientist!
Regular readers are all too familiar with Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger, arguably the most quacktastic site on the Internet. Sure, Joe Mercola is probably the most trafficked quackery site on the Internet, but, being number two (or number three or four, I'm not sure), Mike Adams definitely tries harder. In addition, Joe Mercola steers mostly clear of politics and non-medical pseudoscience. Sure, he promotes just as much quackery as Mike Adams does, if not more, but he doesn't delve into Tea Party-drenched New World…
oracknows | December 4, 2013I'm not really happy to have to write this post, but a blogger's got to do what a blogger's got to do. The reason is that Katie Couric has done something requires—nay, demands—a heapin' helpin' of Orac's characteristic Respectful Insolence. Why should I give the proverbial rodent's posterior about who gets the Insolence today? The reason is that, when it comes to medicine, Katie Couric has done a fair amount of good. After the tragic death of her husband at a young age from colon cancer, she became an activist and spokesperson for colorectal cancer awareness, even famously undergoing her very…
oracknows | December 4, 2013As hard as it is to believe, I've been blogging nearly nine years. Indeed, my nine-year anniversary is coming up in just over a week. It's been almost a decade! Early on during near-decade that I've been laying down bits of Insolence, Respectful, and Not-So-Respectful, I developed an interest in the antivaccine movement. Antivaccinationism, "antivax," or whatever you want to call it, represents a particularly insidious and dangerous form of quackery because it doesn't just endanger the children whose parents don't vaccinate them. It also endangers children who are vaccinated, because vaccines…
oracknows | December 3, 2013I don't normally ask you, my readers for much, if anything, other than to read and for the subset of you who like to be active in the comments to have at it and, if so inclined, to cover my back by swatting down the trolls, quacks, and antivaccinationists who occasionally show up to infest the comments, so that I don't have to. However, given the story of Stanislaw Burzysnki, which I've been covering with frequent blog posts for over two years now, how could I not listen to the appeal of my friend and co-conspirator (note to Burzysnki fans: that "co-conspirator" bit was sarcasm) to take…
oracknows | December 1, 2013It figures.
Whenever there's a holiday or a break where I'm not paying as much attention to the blog as usual, something always seems to happen regarding a story I'm interested and have been blogging about. Remember Sarah Hershberger? She's 11 year old Amish girl who developed lymphoblastic lymphoma, underwent one round of chemotherapy, suffered highly unpleasant side effects from the second round of chemotherapy, and then refused to undergo further chemotherapy. Her parents, distressed at her suffering, decided not to make her continue her therapy. They also see that her cancer has shrunk (…
oracknows | November 29, 2013Well, Thanksgiving's over, and the orgy of consumerism known as Black Friday is in full swing. Personally, I have to work, at least part of the day, and I don't go anywhere near the stores on Black Friday anyway. I haven't for years. So we might as well briefly discuss a bit of science today. It won't be long (by Orac standards), but there was a tidbit of news that hit the blogosphere on Thanksgiving Day that caught my interest. Apparently the execrable study by Gilles Séralini on the effect of using feed made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on rats is heading for retraction. You…
oracknows | November 27, 2013A man on TV is selling me a miracle cure that will keep me young forever. It’s called Androgel…for treating something called Low T, a pharmaceutical company–recognized condition affecting millions of men with low testosterone, previously known as getting older.
—The Colbert Report, December 2012
And now for something completely different...sort of.
Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and I'm busy. Fortunately, I have material to use that has never been posted on this blog before. For those of you who don't also read my not-so-super-secret other blog, it's new to you. For those who do, think of it as an…
oracknows | November 26, 2013As I noted a few days ago, the antivaccine fringe suffered a major setback in the House of Representatives when Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, canceled a previously promised hearing about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, even after it had reached the stage of representatives from the antivaccine Canary Party giving a briefing featuring a boatload of misinformation about the NVICP and the Vaccine Court. Never let it be said, however, that the antivaccine movement can't pivot on a dime to latch onto the latest bit of…
oracknows | November 25, 2013Acupuncture is quackery. This cannot be repeated often enough, and, in fact, over the last several months I've developed a tendency to start all my posts on acupuncture by making sure to remind everyone that it is quackery. The reasons are many-fold. For one thing, the concepts behind acupuncture are based on the claim that somehow, placing little needles into the body along various lines known as meridians, somehow "redirects" the flow of vital life "energy" to healing effect. Never mind that this energy, called "qi," has never been detected, measured, or characterized, nor have have "…
oracknows | November 22, 2013I know I have readers who are neuroscientists. However, do I have readers who are currently attending the 4th Quadrennial Meeting of the Society of Neuro-Oncology in San Francisco going on this weekend? Why do I ask? Given the Regular readers might suspect that it has to do something with a man who has become a regular topic of this blog over the last two years. Yes, I'm referring to Stanislaw Burzynski, the oncologist who has never done a residency in internal medicine or a fellowship in oncology who was the subject of an excellent news report by Liz Szabo in USA TODAY one week ago today,…
oracknows | November 21, 2013Well, it's done. The server migration should be finished. I was out and about last night giving a talk; so I'll only have time for a relatively brief post (for me, at least). Once again, things happen while I'm otherwise...indisposed. This time around, it's something that warms the cockles of what antivaccinationists perceive to be my pharma shill heart. Normally, it's considered bad form to openly express schadenfreude, but I do make at least one exception, and that's when bad things happen to antivaccinationist plans, particularly after they've been crowing about them for weeks.
You might…
oracknows | November 19, 2013And now for something completely different. Well, not exactly. It's just that I have an announcement to make that is for your benefit. Our (usually) benevolent overlords have informed us that they are going to be moving ScienceBlogs over to a new server beginning sometime after midnight tonight:
ScienceBlogs will be moving to a new server environment on Wednesday, November 20th. Although the site will be available throughout the transition, you should not post, edit, draft, comment, or do anything else in WordPress after Tuesday evening, or your work may be lost. Once the new server…