oracknows | September 30, 2013Tomorrow, as mandated by the Patient Protection and the Affordable Care Act (PPACA, often called just the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, or "Obamacare"), the government-maintained health insurance exchanges will open for business (that is, assuming the likely government shutdown doesn't stop them temporarily). This post will be basically a followup to a post I did almost a year ago that used a statement by Mitt Romney during the height of the Presidential campaign as a jumping off point to look at the relationship between health insurance status and mortality. Unfortunately, it is not entirely…
oracknows | September 27, 2013One of the major differences between science-based medicine (SBM) and alternative medicine—or, as they call it these days, "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine"—is that SBM is always questioning itself, always reevaluating its practices. Related to this difference is that SBM does change its practice, discarding treatments that don't work and incorporating those that do work (or at least work better than older practices). As I've said many times before, the process by which this happens is messy and slower than we might like, and that provides ammunition to…
oracknows | September 25, 2013It's rare that my readers send me something that makes me laugh out loud, but this post did. I'll give you a bit of background first, though. Lacking the science to back up their dangerous pseudoscience, antivaccine warriors tend to resort very early to ad hominem attacks. Apparently they figure that if they can discredit the messenger who promotes the message that vaccines are safe and effective (and don't cause autism). One of their favorite techniques to accomplish this is something for which I originally coined a phrase way back in 2005: The Pharma Shill Gambit. You see it whenever…
oracknows | September 24, 2013Does anybody remember the Canary Party? As I described two and a half years ago when I first became aware of it, the Canary Party is a weird mutant hybrid of antivaccinationists convinced that there are "toxins" in vaccines that are making all our children autistic, "health freedom" activists, and, more recently, Tea Party activists. The name of the party was chosen based on the old story about how miners would keep canaries in the mine because they were more sensitive to toxic gases. The idea was that, if the miners saw their canary collapse, they knew they'd better get out of that shaft…
oracknows | September 23, 2013Antivaccine warriors hate science because it does not support their fear and loathing of vaccines. At the same time, they want to use it to justify that very same fear and loathing of vaccines. However, as much as antivaccinationists hate scientific studies that fail to find a link between vaccines and autism or vaccine additives like the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal and autism, there's a certain set of studies that they hate more than any other, and these are the so-called "Danish studies." Indeed, I learned of this hatred a long time ago, when Kristjan Wager wrote a guest post…
oracknows | September 22, 2013I've always known that FOX News has a tendency to go for the sensationalistic story. I've also known that, given Rupert Murdoch's political leanings, politically motivated pseudoscience like anthropogenic global warming denialism is the order of the day on FOX. I've even noticed a disturbing tendency on FOX to promote antivaccine views, for example, when a FOX interviewer tried to blame a case of dystonia on the flu vaccine or when the infotainment drones on Fox and Friends let The Donald (a.k.a. Donald Trump) blather ignorantly about vaccines and autism. I knew all that. However, I didn't…
oracknows | September 19, 2013One of the greatest mysteries I've encountered since I started following the case of Stanislaw Burzynski is how he's managed to keep practicing for 36 years after he first began treating patients with his concoction of peptides purportedly isolated from blood and urine that he dubbed "antineoplastons" (ANPs) because of their alleged ability to inhibit the growth of cancer. This is not an issue that is by any means unique to Burzynski; I've discussed other cases like this, such as Rolando Arafiles, who used his business relationship with the local sheriff to fend off the Texas Medical Board (…
oracknows | September 18, 2013
Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle...When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser.
- General George S. Patton, Jr., June 5, 1944
General George S. Patton, Jr. was famous for his flamboyance and aggressiveness going on the attack, among other things. He was also known for a number of pithy quotes made throughout his…
oracknows | September 18, 2013If there's one thing I've learned about antivaccinationists, it's that they're all about the double standards. For instance, to them if Paul Offit makes money off of his rotavirus vaccine, he's a pharma shill, a hopelessly compromised "biostitute" (as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called him) or "Dr. Proffit", and therefore to be dismissed on that basis alone regardless of his knowledge of science. If I happen to get a small grant from a pharmaceutical company, even though it isn't even enough to pay the full salary of a postdoctoral fellow, or receive a small amount of money for my blogging from a…
oracknows | September 17, 2013I love this video. There's really little else to say other than the tagline: "Vaccines: And now my kids don't die." Vaccines truly are a wonder drug. You know it's good if Orac can't construct a 3,000 word post around it and decides just to let the video speak for itself:
oracknows | September 16, 2013One of the fun things about blogging is that I can often follow how various issues develop and, more importantly, insert my opinion into the issue. As bizarre as it seems to me even almost nine years after starting this blog that anyone keeps reading what I have to lay down (and it still does seem bizarre that anyone cares much what I have to say every day, but several thousand of you apparently do), that's what I continue to be here for. Last month, I wrote about an editorial by the director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) in which she called for a "…
oracknows | September 15, 2013Let me begin this post by offering my sincere condolences to Fabio Lanzoni. His sister died about a month ago. As you might recall, she had ovarian cancer She was unfortunate, and she suffered and ultimately, apparently, died of her disease at far too young an age. If that were all there were to the story, that would be all there is to this post. Unfortunately, that is not all there is to the story; so that can't be all there is to this post. You might recall that Fabio brought his sister Christina to be treated by Stanislaw Burzynski and, in doing so, allowed himself to be sucked into…
oracknows | September 13, 2013Naturopathy is quackery. There, I said it. Actually, I've said it many times before, because it is. The problem with naturopathy, of course, is that it is so diffuse and encompasses so many different forms of quackery that it's hard to categorize. Basically, it's anything that can be portrayed as "natural," be it traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy (which is an integral component of naturopathy, something that should tell you all you need to know about naturopathy), herbalism, energy healing, Ayurvedic medicine, the four humors, or whatever. Seemingly, there is no quackery that…
oracknows | September 11, 2013My goodness, when it rains, it pours, to use a cliche. (And I'm not about anything if not throwing in the odd cliche in my writing from time to time.)
Just yesterday, I discussed the resurrection of an antivaccine zombie meme, namely the claim that Maurice Hilleman admitted that the polio vaccine that was contaminated with SV40 in the early years of the polio vaccine causes human cancer and that the polio vaccine also brought AIDS into the US. That came hot on the heels of another antivaccine zombie meme three weeks ago, specifically the claim that Diane Harper, one of the main clinical…
oracknows | September 11, 2013
The Internet has produced a revolution with respect to information. Now, people anywhere, any time, can find almost any information that they want, as long as they have a connection to the global network and aren't unfortunate enough to live in a country that heavily censors the Internet connections coming in. In addition, anyone any time can put his or her opinion out on the Internet and it might be read by people on the other side of the planet. For example, it continually amazes me that my blatherings here are read by people in Australia and New Zealand, as well as Europe and pretty…
oracknows | September 9, 2013Last week was kind of a downer. Oh, sure, I had some fun with choice idiocy by Mike Adams. its posts about murder and attempted murder of autistic teens and the whitewashing of the murder of Alex Spourdalakis by her mother and caregiver, which led to antivaccinationists complaining to my cancer center again. So the last few days have been a fairly unrelenting downer.
That's why I was highly amused to see something called Get Tall 1000. There are so many things about Get Tall 1000 that are completely hilarious (if you're a skeptic) that it's hard to know where to start. I mean, the claims for…
oracknows | September 8, 2013It occurs to me that it's been a while since I've written anything about Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Truth be told, I had been hoping not to write about him for a while, and I had been actually succeeding. The last time I took notice of him was about a month ago, when his propagandist Eric Merola whined about how Dr. Hidaeki Tsuda, the Japanese anesthesiologist who was featured in the second movie that Merola made about Burzynski, had seen his latest manuscript rapidly rejected by The Lancet Oncology. In Tsuda's segment in the movie he claimed to have done a clinical trial showing that the…
Is Sharyl Attkisson feeling the heat over her irresponsible reporting of the Alex Spourdalakis case?
oracknows | September 6, 2013Yesterday, I did a bit of navel gazing about how cranks, quacks, and antivaccinationists have a penchant for attacking skeptics at work in order to try to intimidate them into silence. Reading the post over again, I realize that it came across perhaps more whiny than it should have, but I guess I was just in that sort of mood when I wrote it. One thing that I didn't discuss, though, is how attacks like this have traditionally been a very reliable indication that that I'm on the right track with respect to the quackery being called out. When I write my usual, run-of-the-mill posts about…
oracknows | September 4, 2013Antivaccinationists, quacks, and apologists for antivaccinationists and quacks (but I repeat myself) seem to have an illusion that I'm just swimming in pharma lucre, that I sit in my underwear grinding out magnum opus-worthy after magnum opus-worthy blog posts, all so that I can rake in the cash hand over fist, lead a life of pure luxury, and enjoy ruthlessly crushing any hint of dissent regarding science-based medicine. Even if that assessment were completely true, as Lord Draconis Zeneca tells us that it is, it's not all easy being a prolific, logorrheic pharma shill servilely doing the…
oracknows | September 4, 2013About a week ago, I wrote about something that really irritates me, namely that most despicable of antivaccine claims, which is that shaken baby syndrome is somehow a misdiagnosis for vaccine injury. It is a claim that, as far as I can recall, began when, for reasons that have continued to elude me more than a decade later, the antivaccine movement glommed onto the case of Alan Yurko, a man convicted of shaking his girlfriend's baby to death, and tried to get him freed based on the claim that the baby had really died from encephalitis caused by vaccine injury. The claim was so ridiculous as…