oracknows | November 19, 2013While I've been all tied up paying attention to the developments in the Stanislaw Burzynski case, it figures that President Obama would go and do something like nominating the next Surgeon General. Normally, this is not such a big deal, because there really hasn't been a Surgeon General who has really been particularly well-known or had much of an impact since Dr. C. Everett Koop, although back when President Obama first took office Dr. Sanjay Gupta's name was floated as a possibility for the position. Obviously, he didn't get it. (I'm guessing that being a neurosurgeon and CNN's chief…
oracknows | November 18, 2013I was very pleased last Friday, very pleased indeed. Given the normal subject matter of this blog, in which we face a seemingly unrelenting infiltration of pseudoscience and quackery into even the most hallowed halls of academic medicine, against which we seem to be fighting a mostly losing battle, having an opportunity to see such an excellent deconstruction of bad science and bad medicine in a large mainstream news outlet like USA TODAY is rare and gratifying. As you might recall, USA TODAY reporter Liz Szabo capped off a months-long investigation of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and his…
oracknows | November 15, 2013I've made no secret of how much I despise Stanislaw Burzynski, the self-proclaimed cancer doctor and medical researcher who has been treating patients with an unproven, unapproved chemotherapeutic agent since 1977, seemingly slithering around, under, over, and past all attempts to investigate him and shut him down. Along the way, Burzynski has become a hero to the cancer quackery industry, touted as the man who can cure incurable cancers that science-based medicine can't, even though his treatment, antineoplastons, allegedly peptides isolated from blood and urine that normally keep cancer in…
oracknows | November 14, 2013A couple of weeks ago, I noted a new trend among the antivaccine glitterati, or maybe I should refer to it as a new trope. That particular trope is to refer to anyone who has the temerity to stand up for science, support vaccines, and criticize antivaccinationists like the crew at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism or the moms full of the arrogance of ignorance over at The (Not-So) Thinking Moms' Revolution as "bullies." Part and parcel of this trope is to try to portray aggressively countering the antivaccine misinformation that flows from such sources in a seemingly unending stream as…
oracknows | November 13, 2013I had a busy time yesterday and last night and was just too tired to blog seriously last night. So I'm afraid there's no epic Orac-ian screed/rant/brilliance/insightful analysis today. (Fear not. I expect something worth tearing into later this week, however.) So, in the absence of new Insolent brilliance, let us all take a moment to proclaim our gratitude that longtime quack and scammer, Kevin Trudeau, is almost certainly going to jail again:
Hawking everything from financial advice to weight-loss solutions, the smooth-talking Trudeau managed for more than a decade to stay one step ahead of…
oracknows | November 12, 2013Last week, everyone's favorite woo-meister, the man whose woo is so strong that I even coined a term for it way back in the early mists of time (at least as far as this blog is concerned), was woo-fully whining about all those allegedly nasty skeptics on Wikipedia. Yes, Deepak Chopra was clutching his pearls and getting all huffy because, according to him, a group of skeptics known as the Guerilla Skeptics was actually applying science and reason to the Wikipedia entry for his good buddy Rupert Sheldrake. The only problem was, he totally missed the target in that the Guerilla Skeptics…
oracknows | November 10, 2013It's been a while since I've written about Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston cancer doctor who inexplicably has been permitted to continue to administer an unproven cancer treatment to children with deadly brain cancers for nearly 37 years now. Beginning in 1977, when he left Baylor College of Medicine and opened up the Burzynski Clinic, Burzynski has administered a cancer therapy that he calls antineoplastons to patients. After nearly four decades and several dozen phase II clinical trials started, he never published a completed phase II trial. The only evidence he's published consists mainly…
oracknows | November 10, 2013Never let it be said that Orac can't match Mark Crislip in shameless promotion. The world might indeed need more Mark Crislip™, but I like to think that it needs a bit more of his friends, too. So, in that spirit, here are the videos, recently released by the James Randi Educational Foundation, of Bob Blaskiewicz, myself, and some key SBM players that you've come to know and love. The first video is a talk by my best "friend" in the world at The Amazing Meeting in July about Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD. It's entitled Why We Fight (Part I): Stanislaw Burzynski Versus Science-Based Medicine.…
oracknows | November 8, 2013The other day, I pointed out that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, was following in the footsteps of the former chair of the committee, likely the quackiest, most antivaccine Congressman who ever served in the House of Representatives. Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN). I guess that since Burton retired at the end of the last Congress, someone has to step up to the plate when it comes to pushing the antivaccine agenda. Issa is doing that by holding a hearing a year ago on "autism" that was in reality a thinly disguised excuse to castigate…
oracknows | November 7, 2013About a year ago, I became aware of the latest celebrity antivaccinationist with a penchant for saying truly stupid things and thus making an even bigger fool of himself than he usually does. I'm referring to Rob "makin' copies" Schneider, who most recently has been making waves for narrating a misinformation-packed "viral" video about the Vaccine Court and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP). It's a video that's so mendacious that it even amazes me, and I've been watching the antivaccine movement for a decade now.
However, back in 2012, Rob Scheider, apparently being a…
oracknows | November 6, 2013People who follow the antivaccine movement might remember that around this time last year, Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), a particularly antiscience legislator who appears to be trying to take up the antivaccine mantle left behind when Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) retired at the end of the last session of Congress. Given that he now chairs the House committee that Burton once chaired, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Issa decided to take up that mantle by following Burton's lead when he was the chair and scheduled an antivaccine hearing last November, right after…
oracknows | November 6, 2013Like many cases of children with cancer whose parents tried to deny them curative therapy in the past that I've written about, I've become intensely interested in the case of 10-year-old Amish girl with lymphoblastic lymphoma. Her name is Sarah Hershberg, and, in a rare instance of the state actually stepping in to protect the life of a child whose parents choose quackery over effective therapy, the court actually named a guardian to make medical decisions for her, leading the quacks and quack apologists to lose their minds. Sadly, the Hershbergers have reportedly fled the country, although,…
oracknows | November 5, 2013This one's too brief to be worth a full Orac-ian deconstruction, but it's so juicy that I can't resist mentioning. Regular readers know that Mike Adams, the all-purpose crank who founded NaturalNews.com, is a frequent target topic on this blog. The reason is obvious. Whether it be his support of quackery, his rants against vaccines, his vile attacks on cancer patients, or his New World Order conspiracy mongering and support of the radical fringe in US politics, no one brings home the crazy quite like Mike Adams, and no one brings home such a wide variety and vast quantity of crazy, with the…
oracknows | November 4, 2013It occurs to me that things have been perhaps overly serious here at the ol' blog for the last couple of weeks. Don't get me wrong. I think I done good lately, if I do say so myself. However, the constant drumbeat of quackery and depressing stories takes its toll after a while. I need a break.
And our old buddy, Deepak Chopra, was kind enough to give it to me.
So what is it this time? Chopra's been a frequent topic of this blog for a long time, albeit nos so much lately. Indeed, longtime readers know that I was the one who coined a term—Choprawoo—for the pseudoprofound metaphysical mystical…
oracknows | November 3, 2013Here we go again.
Over the last month or so, I've been intermittently writing about a very sad case, a case that reminds me of too many cases that have come before, such as Abraham Cherrix, Kate Wernecke, Daniel Hauser, and Jacob Stieler. All of these are stories of children who were diagnosed with highly curable cancers who refused chemotherapy and were supported in that decision by their parents. Generally pediatric cancers have an 80-90% five year survival, and recurrences after five years are rare; given that children can be expected to live many decades, the consequences of refusing life…
oracknows | November 1, 2013There's been a post over at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism that I had meant to address when it first broke its head through the surface of the stupid to spew more stupid. Fortunately, nothing much was going on in the blogosphere that compelled me; so this was a good time to revisit the post and take care of some unfinished business, particularly given that there have been followup posts since then. It also goes to show how antivaccine cranks like to misuse language, sometimes unintentionally (which is probably the case here) and sometimes intentionally (too many examples over the…
oracknows | October 30, 2013Having just discussed yesterday the demonization of chemotherapy and how bad its side effects can be, I was thinking last night that it was time to move on, that I had gotten stuck in rut writing too many cancer-related posts in a row. Then, as so often happens, I came across something that so irritated me that I realized that I had to take one more dip into the same well. Before I do that, let's go back a couple of weeks to a man named Chris Wark. You remember Chris Wark, don't you? He's the man responsible for the Chris Beat Cancer website. In that website, Wark claims to have beaten stage…
oracknows | October 30, 2013If there's one medical treatment that proponents of "alternative medicine" love to hate, it's chemotherapy. Rants against "poisoning" are a regular staple on "alternative health" websites, usually coupled with insinuations or outright accusations that the only reason oncologists administer chemotherapy is because of the "cancer industrial complex" in which big pharma profits massively from selling chemotherapeutic agents and oncologists and hospitals profit massively from administering them. Indeed, I've lost track of the number of such rants I've deconstructed over the last nine years.…
oracknows | October 28, 2013Yesterday's post about Sarah Hershberger, the Amish girl from northeast Ohio with lymphoblastic lymphoma who refused chemotherapy, prompting a court battle that led to the appointment of a medical guardian for her to make sure she receives treatment, got me to thinking (always a dangerous thing). Actually, I had to think back over the years about all the similar cases of unfortunate children with cancer whose misfortune was compounded by having been born to woo-loving parents, such as Daniel Hauser.
These stories are depressingly similar, as are the arguments that go on over them. First, a…
oracknows | October 27, 2013A couple of weeks ago, I commented on the story of 10 year old Amish girl in northeast Ohio with cancer whose parents, alarmed by the side effects of chemotherapy, had decided to stop the chemotherapy and treat their daughter with folk medicine instead. As a result, alarmed at the likelihood that Sarah Hershberger would suffer and die unnecessarily at a young age, the hospital treating her, Akron Children's Hospital, went to court. It lost the first round, but earlier this month the original ruling was overturned, and it was ordered that Hershberger undergo chemotherapy to save her life. The…