oracknows | July 8, 2013I don't know why I'm interested in this, to the point where I'm on my sixth post about it since February. I sometimes even ask myself that very question, because taking an admittedly somewhat perverse interest in the internecine feuds among antivaccinationists. Maybe it's a bit of schadenfreude. Maybe it's just me. Whatever the reason, the ongoing feud between Jake "Boy Wonder" Crosby and his former mentors and allies in the antivaccine movement keeps bringing me back for more, as it did last week after a couple of months away. Maybe it's because when the antivaccine movement is fighting…
oracknows | July 7, 2013Since I've been on a bit of a roll with respect to acupuncture over the last week or so, I thought I'd just round out the trilogy with one more post. One myth that acupuncture apologists like to promote relentlessly is that acupuncture is completely harmless, that it almost never causes complications or problems. While it's true that acupuncture is relatively safe, it still involves sticking needles into the skin, and, given that, it would be delusional to think that there couldn't be injury caused by that. Rarely, however, have I seen a story like this from Canada reported in the National…
oracknows | July 4, 2013TAM is fast approaching, which means one thing (at least this year). I need to get my Plexiglass blinky posterior in gear in order to have my talks together in time. I spent part of yesterday doing that, but, unfortunately, I have to work today in order to help to make up for the clinic I'll be missing next week; so you'll forgive me if this post might look familiar to a subset of you who know where you might have seen some of this discussion before elsewhere. Those of you who haven't, you're in for some good blogging, if I do say so myself. Whichever group you belong to, we'll get back to…
oracknows | July 3, 2013Here we go again.
Oh, well. These things come in waves, and sometimes I have theme weeks. Right now, this week appears to be developing into a week of quackademic medicine involving dubious acupuncture studies. Yesterday, it was acupuncture for lymphedema after breast cancer surgery, a study coming right about what is rapidly becoming the Barad-dûr of cancer quackademia, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. How a hospital that is so awesome in every other way can have such a blind spot bigger than the Eye of Sauron, I don't know, but it does, and the result is a steady stream of…
oracknows | July 2, 2013Lymphedema is a complication of breast cancer surgery that all surgeons who do breast surgery detest. Patients, of course, detest it even more. The limb swelling that is the primary symptom of lymphedema comes about because surgery on the axillary lymph nodes (the lymph nodes under the arm) that is part and parcel of surgery for breast cancer can interrupt lymph vessels and cause backup of lymph fluid in the affected arm. This backup has consequences, including skin changes, a tendency towards infections, and, in extreme cases, elephantiasis (which is, fortunately, rarely seen these days as a…
oracknows | June 30, 2013There's a general rule that whenever you see two enemies fighting with each other that you should generally just let them. Of course, some might argue, as Gandalf did about Saruman and Sauron, that the winner of the fight would emerge stronger and free of doubt, making him harder to conquer. Fortunately, I don't think this will be a problem in this case in the battle I'm about to discuss. There's also the saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but unfortunately I don't think that that saying applies here either. In this case, it's a question of which of the two combatants I consider…
oracknows | June 28, 2013A little more than a week ago, I took note of Dr. Paul Offit's new book, Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine and a story in which he was featured in USA Today about the nonsense that is alternative medicine. The news story coincided with the release of Paul Offit's book, which of course led me to express my admiration for not only Offit's ability to write good books about topics that interest me but to garner the publicity of a major story in a national newspaper published the same day his book was released. No wonder he drives the antivaccine lunatic…
oracknows | June 27, 2013Antivaccinationists endanger public health. They deny to high heaven that that is what they do, but they are deluding themselves. Their fear mongering about vaccines, in which vaccines in general or specific ingredients are portrayed as causing autism and a wide variety of chronic diseases, despite study after study failing to find even a whiff of a hint of a correlation between vaccines or vaccine ingredients and autism, have resulted in precipitous declines in vaccination rates in some areas and contributed to an increase in the distrust of vaccines by parents. In the US, although overall…
oracknows | June 25, 2013I write about cancer quackery a lot, and I've been at it for over a decade. I first cut my teeth on Usenet, delving into that cesspit of unreason known as misc.health. alternative, where my eyes were opened to just the sorts of pseudoscientific and unscientific cancer treatments patients are enticed into trying, sometimes in lieu of effective, science-based therapy. Sometimes, they're lucky enough to get away with it, such cases occurring most commonly when they have undergone effective primary surgery or other therapy for their cancer that eliminated it before the quackery was ever tried.…
oracknows | June 25, 2013Once again, real life, mainly the eternal search (i.e., groveling) for grant money to keep my lab going, interferes with unreal life. Three grant applications due the same week will do that. Hopefully this will be the last time for a while, at least until unreal life might interfere with unreal life in a couple of weeks at TAM.
In the meantime, it occurs to me. With the recent reacquaintance of skeptical bloggers with the amazing antivaccine crankery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (specifically, when he decided to use Holocaust analogies for vaccines and autism), I thought it might be fun to…
oracknows | June 24, 2013Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times, thanks to three grant deadlines. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in November 2010 and be assured that I'll be back tomorrow. Remember, if you've been reading less than three and a half years, it's new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than two and a half years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged.
Every so often, the reality of trying to maintain a career in science-based…
oracknows | June 20, 2013We skeptical bloggers try our best to educate our readers about science and critical thinking, in the process explaining why various forms of pseudoscience, quackery, and cranker are, well, pseudoscience, quackery, and crankery. Unfortunately, even the most heavy duty, high traffic skeptical blogs don't have anywhere near the reach of the mass media, in particular television. Unfortunately, we are awash in credulity in the mass media, compared to which it sometimes feels as though the forces of reason and science are but a rowboat buffeted about by a tsunami of unreason. I saw just such an…
oracknows | June 20, 2013Every so often, I like to try to get into the mind of an antivaccine crank, a quack, or crank of another variety, because understanding what makes cranks tick (at least, as much as I can given that I'm not one) can be potentially very useful in my work trying to counter them. On the one hand, it's not easy, because understanding conspiracy theorists, really bad science, and a sense of persecution shared by nearly all cranks doesn't come natural to me, but it's a useful exercise, and I encourage all of you to do it from time to time. While it might not be possible (or even desirable) to "walk…
oracknows | June 18, 2013Sometimes, between blogging, a demanding day (and night) job doing surgery and science, and everything else, I embarrass myself. Sure, sometimes I embarrass myself by saying something that, in retrospect, I wish I hadn't. More often, I embarrass myself by letting things slide that I shouldn't. For instance, when friends send me a prepublication copy of their books, I should damned well read them, don't you think? So it was that Paul Offit sent me a copy of his latest book, which just hit the bookstores and online outlets this week, Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of…
oracknows | June 17, 2013It's been a while since I've written about MMS. You remember MMS, don't you? It's an abbreviation for "miracle mineral solution," a solution first promoted by a man who is inaptly named Jim Humble. Basically, as I've described in multiple blog posts, MMS is bleach, specifically chlorine dioxide (ClO2). I first became acutely aware of it a little more than a year ago, when I noticed that the antivaccine autism biomed quackfest known as Autism One featured a talk by a woman named Kerri Rivera, who advocated using MMS to "bleach autism away," as I put it at the time. Of course, Jim Humble doesn'…
oracknows | June 16, 2013I never used to write much about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) before. I still don't do it that often. For whatever reason, it just hasn't been on my radar very much. That seems to be changing, however. It's not because I went seeking this issue out (although I must admit that I first became interested in genetic engineering when I was in junior high and read a TIME Magazine cover article about it back in the 1970s), but rather because in my reading I keep seeing it more and more in the context of anti-GMO activists using bad science and bad reasoning to justify a campaign to demonize…
oracknows | June 15, 2013I've been trying to lay off the blogging on the weekend for a long time now, and, for the most part, I've been successful, as I'm sure regular readers will have noticed. However, sometimes I just can't help but take a few minutes to note particularly entertaining or important developments. This particular development falls into the former category. I certainly can't say that it's important, but it certainly is very entertaining. It's also something that's well-deserved.
So all I'll say is, "Congratulations, Jake Crosby!" You've earned it. Few people I know are more deserving of a spot in the…
oracknows | June 13, 2013Sometimes, in the course of blogging, I come across a story that I don't know what to make of. Sometimes, it's a quack or a crank taking a seemingly science-based position. Sometimes it's something out of the ordinary. Other times, it's a story that's just weird, such that I strongly suspect that something else is going on but can't prove it. So it was a few months ago when I came across the story of Alex Spourdalakis, a 14-year-old autistic boy who became a cause célèbre of the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism.
I first noticed the story in early March when perusing AoA to see what the…
oracknows | June 13, 2013For a long time, going back almost to the beginning of this blog eight and a half years ago, I've referred to the "bait and switch" of alternative medicine. What I mean by that is the manner in which advocates of alternative medicine—or, as they like to call it these days, "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, more recently still, "integrative medicine"—co-opt perfectly science-based modalities like diet, nutrition, and exercise as being somehow "alternative." Alternatively, they woo-ify such science-based modalities and then claim them as CAM. Either way, they deceptively give…
oracknows | June 11, 2013What's Keith Kloor got that I haven't got?
What's Laura Helmuth got that I haven't got?
Why won't Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. call me to complain about all the not-so-Respectful Insolence I've directed his way over the years. I mean, seriously. I spend nearly eight years criticizing his antivaccine crank views, and these two get personal attention from The Man after just one post! I don't even get an e-mail, even though it's right there: orac@scienceblogs.com.
I'm sorry. I'm just feeling a little envious (do Plexiglass boxes of blinking colored lights feel envy?) because both Kloor and Helmuth…