oracknows | February 25, 2013It's been well over two weeks since I urged everyone to get out the popcorn and sit back to enjoy the internecine war going on over in the antivaccine movement. The reason for my chuckling was the way that everyone's favorite Boy Wonder Reporter Propagandist for the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, Jake Crosby, had apparently turned on his masters because he was ticked off at a perceived betrayal of purity in their antivaccine beliefs, so much so that he actually posted a screed against the other wretched hive of scum and quackery besides AoA or The Huffington Post, namely the…
oracknows | February 24, 2013That the myth that vaccines cause autism is indeed nothing more than a myth, a phantom, a delusion unsupported by science is no longer in doubt. In fact, it's been many years now since it was last taken seriously by real scientists and physicians, as opposed to crank scientists and physicians, who are still selling the myth. Thanks to them, and a dedicated cadre of antivaccine activists, the myth is like Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, or Freddy Krueger at the end of one of their slasher flicks. The slasher or monster appears to be dead, but we know that he isn't because we know that he'll…
oracknows | February 21, 2013Is it just me, or are medical propaganda films becoming the preferred media for "brave maverick doctors, dubious doctors, and quacks to promote their wares? I just pointed out how everybody's favorite "brave maverick doctor," he of the therapy for cancer for which there is no compelling evidence but that he keeps administering anyway, using the clinical trial process to avoid pesky rules about administering unapproved drugs and that is nothing more at its core than an orphan drug without compelling evidence for efficacy and of the "personalized gene-targeted therapy for dummies" based on…
oracknows | February 21, 2013Over the last couple of weeks, I've been discussing How "They" See "Us," which is basically that "they" see "us" as pure evil. Well, maybe not always sheer evil, but certainly not good, and even more certainly as having ulterior motives, the most common of which is filthy pharma lucre. As a result, when a grant deadline approached, I reposted a post about the "pharma shill gambit." However, how do these brave maverick doctors see themselves? Given that I'm traveling (and my plans have been impacted by the big storm heading through Kansas and Missouri now, it seemed appropriate given that I…
oracknows | February 20, 2013Here's a little thought experiment for proponents of "alternative medicine." Imagine, if you will, a small pharmaceutical company. Founded in the 1970s, it has starts out with only one product, a drug that its founder thought to be a very promising anticancer agent. So enamored of this particular drug was the founder of the company that he left a job with an academic medical center, founded his own clinic, and then his own research institute and company to manufacture the new drug. After first having painstakingly isolated the substances that make up his drug, he later started to synthesize…
oracknows | February 18, 2013Discussing Stanislaw Burzynski's abuse of science while contemplating how even his success stories really aren't yesterday reminded me of a topic that I discussed rather extensively not long after I moved my blog over to ScienceBlogs and have covered sporadically since then. I'm referring to the case of Abraham Cherrix. Cherrix, for those who haven't been regular readers long enough to have encounter him before, was a 15 year old boy who was unfortunate enough to develop Hodgkin's lymphoma. Unfortunately for him, rather than undergoing curative therapy, he decided that he wanted "natural"…
oracknows | February 17, 2013About a week and a half ago, I noted that the FDA had apparently paid every skeptic's favorite cancer doctor who is not an oncologist, Stanislaw Burzynski, a visit, while taking notice of a particularly credulous piece of puff journalism that portrayed Dr. Burzynski as a "brave maverick doctor" fighting The Man, who (of course) is trying to keep him down because he has The Natural Cure For Cancer "They" Don't Want You Sheeple To Know About.
Burzynski, as you recall, is the Houston doctor who claims to have much better results curing incurable cancers than conventional evidence-based…
oracknows | February 15, 2013You might have noticed that I've been...preoccupied. I posted a "rerun" on Thursday, and yesterday I didn't even post at all. That doesn't mean that I don't check in from time to time to see what you all are doing in my absence. That's how I saw this comment from Dangerous Bacon (cool 'nym, BTW—I've always wanted to mention that):
Hey, enough of this “I’m working on a grant application” excuse.
Orac needs to get back up to his mom’s attic and crank out some new posts.
Fear not. The grant has been submitted. On the other hand, I'm giving a talk next week in Missouri, and I have to put the…
oracknows | February 14, 2013Over the last couple of days, I've been discussing How "They" See "Us," which is basically that "they" see "us" as pure evil. Well, maybe not always sheer evil, but certainly not good, and even more certainly as having ulterior motives, the most common of which is filthy pharma lucre. So it seemed appropriate, as a grant deadline fast approaches and constrains my time, to revisit a topic that comes up here from time to time. Basically, every so often, my day job intrudes on my blogging hobby, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to…
oracknows | February 13, 2013Yesterday, I wrote about how "they" view "us," the "they" being believers in dubious medicine, pseudoscience, and outright quackery. As examples, I used believers in the unsupported claims of "brave maverick" cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski and antivaccine activists who are utterly convinced, against all science and evidence, that vaccines caused their children's autism. I pointed out at the time that many of these people really, really do believe that "we" (i.e., skeptics and supporters of science-based medicine who criticize the various modalities they passionately believe in) are not…
oracknows | February 11, 2013Those of us who dedicate considerable time and effort to combatting quackery generally do it because we think we're doing good. Certainly, I wouldn't spend so much time nearly every evening blogging the way I do if I didn't think so. It's true that I also enjoy it, but if I were doing this just for enjoyment I'm sure I could manage to find other topics that I could write about. In actuality, way back in deepest darkest beginnings of this blog, I did write about a lot of other things. My skeptical topics were more general in nature, encompassing not just medicine but evolution versus "…
oracknows | February 10, 2013Epigenetics. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I realize I overuse that little joke, but I can't help but think that virtually every time I see advocates of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's known more commonly now, "integrative medicine" discussing epigenetics. All you have to do to view mass quantities of misinterpretation of the science of epigenetics is to type the word into the "search" box of a website like Mercola.com or NaturalNews.com, and you'll be treated to large numbers of articles touting the latest…
oracknows | February 8, 2013Alright, I give up. I'm getting out the popcorn. It's a Friday night, and it's on, baby! It's so on that I'm breaking one of my blogging rules and writing up a blog post on Friday night, which is when I usually try to relax. I suppose that it helps that I'm working tonight anyway, with a grant deadline coming, something I usually don't do on a Friday night either if I can help it, and could use a brief entertainment break. Besides, right now I'm watching my favorite guilty pleasure Spartacus:War of the Damned, and wasn't going to be working while I watched anyway. So off we go! The reason is…
oracknows | February 8, 2013Earlier this week, there was a very bad, very credulous story was broadcast. Now, I realize that this is not an uncommon occurrence. Indeed, I'm sure that this sort of thing happens pretty much every day somewhere in the country and even on national media, but on this particular occasion the story was about a man who has become a frequent topic of this blog, namely Stanislaw Burzynski. Burzynski, as you recall, is the Polish physician who runs a cancer clinic in Houston that attracts desperate patients with advanced cancer from all over the world to spend huge sums of money for his treatment…
oracknows | February 6, 2013On the one hand, I'm seriously tempted to get out the popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show that is the internecine conflict going on in the antivaccine movement right now. On the other hand, as bizarre as it sounds, I actually do feel a bit sorry for the main combatant, Jake Crosby. He's the guy whom I likened to an antivaccine Frankenstein's monster turning on his creators last week. The reason was that Jake had become very, very unhappy with the antivaccine leaders who created him, or at least who created the blogging phenomenon that is Jake Crosby, Internet Detective and Disher of Dirt.…
oracknows | February 4, 2013Gary Null loves me! He really loves me!
Well, maybe not Gary Null, but Sayer Ji. You remember Sayer Ji, don't you? He's the guy who runs GreenMedInfo.com who showed up on my skeptical radar when he claimed that vaccines are "transhumanism" that subverts evolution. (Seriously, you can't make stuff like this up.) On another occasion, he attacked Bill Gates for funding projects to monitor the antivaccine movement, and went wild attacking such activities as though they were a bad thing. Most recently, Ji launched a spectacularly inept attack on evidence-based medicine in which he tried to…
oracknows | February 3, 2013If I've pointed it out once, I've pointed it out a thousand times. Naturopathy is a cornucopia of almost every quackery you can think of. Be it homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, applied kinesiology, anthroposophical medicine, reflexology, craniosacral therapy, Bowen Technique, and pretty much any other form of unscientific or prescientific medicine that you can imagine, it's hard to think of a single form of pseudoscientific medicine and quackery that naturopathy doesn't embrace or at least tolerate. Indeed, as I've retorted before to apologists for naturopathy who…
oracknows | February 2, 2013It's good to see that the organizers of the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation finally realized its mistake:
Actress Jenny McCarthy has been dumped again. McCarthy won't be in Ottawa for Bust A Move.
The Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation reacted today to a public backlash in signing the anti-vaccine campaigner to the Ottawa breast health fundraiser.
As I said before when I first noted the extreme idiocy of their decision to feature an anti-science twit like Jenny McCarthy, whose antivaccine activism directly endangers cancer patients, I can't figure out what the organizers were thinking. I…
oracknows | February 1, 2013Almost everyone knows the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster. It's such a classic tale that has been around so long and told so many times in so many ways that it's almost impossible for someone living in this country not to have encountered it growing up. Frankenstein's monster is also a tale that strikes me as an excellent metaphor for something that I witnessed that puzzled the hell out of me the other day, because, as everyone knows, during the tale the monster ultimately turns on its master, wreaking its revenge by killing people Victor loves and, depending on the telling,…
oracknows | January 31, 2013I'm sure this is a case where someone thought it was a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, it's not. It's an astoundingly bad idea:
The Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation is bringing McCarthy to town March 2 to headline its annual Bust a Move fundraiser as a guest fitness instructor. But the actress, author and former Playboy playmate is perhaps best known these days for her unconventional views on autism, specifically her anti-vaccination writings. Her son Evan Joseph was diagnosed with autism in 2005, but McCarthy says now her son is in “recovery” and is doing much better.
McCarthy has…