oracknows | January 29, 2013On Monday of this week, Michael Specter published an article in The New Yorker entitled THE OPERATOR: Is the most trusted doctor in America doing more harm than good? In the article, Specter expended considerable verbiage that, as I explained yesterday, was beautiful in how it let Oz reveal through his own words that (1) he is no longer a scientist and (2) how he views science-based medicine as apparently religion and just another way of knowing. Indeed, so off the wall were Oz's utterances in this article that Jeff Bercovici boiled it down, summarizing it as Dr. Oz's Five Wackiest Medical…
oracknows | January 28, 2013In the beginning, medicine was religion. Indeed, if you look at the history of medicine, you'll see that the very first physicians were virtually always religious figures in addition to their roles as healers. Indeed, in ancient Egypt, for example, the professions of priest and healer were one, and most medicine involved incantations, invocations of magic, and, of course, prayers to the gods, who were believed to be both the cause and the cure of human disease. Amulets were particularly popular, and consisted of three types: homeopoetic, phylactic and theophoric. Homeopoetic amulets, for…
oracknows | January 28, 2013The weekend was busy, and I was working on grants, which meant that I could only come up with one post of Orac-style length and depth. Sadly, it wasn't for this blog. Fortunately, C0nc0rdance came to the rescue with a must-watch video about our old friend Stanislaw Burzynski. He's the guy who claims to treat cancer more successfully than conventional medicine—and not by a little—using chemicals he calles "antineoplastons," which he originally isolated from urine but now synthesizes in a laboratory. More recently, he's been claiming to deliver "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy" that…
oracknows | January 25, 2013Three years ago, the influenza season was a really big deal. The reason, of course, is that the 2009-2010 flu season was dominated by fears of the H1N1 strain, so much so that it was a rare flu season that there were two recommended vaccines, one for the originally expected strains of flu and one for the H1N1 strain. Fortunately for all of us, the H1N1 fear mostly fizzled, but public health officials were in a bad place. Under-react, and if the pandemic turned out to be as bad as the worst case scenarios predicted before the pandemic, and they'd be crucified for not having done everything…
oracknows | January 24, 2013The last couple of days have been very busy, as you might have guessed from my brief (for me) post on Tuesday and my—shall we say?—appropriation of a post to use for yesterday. Today's going to be the same, but for more pleasant reasons than having had to go out to dinner with a visiting professor and being out until 10:30 PM and slaving away at grant applications. Last night an unexpected surprise arrived. Well, it wasn't a surprise that it arrived; it was a surprise that it arrived yesterday, as I hadn't expected it until today, and a couple of weeks ago I hadn't expected it before the end…
oracknows | January 22, 2013Way back in the day, when I was a newbie at countering the mass of hysterical pseudoscience that is the antivaccine movement, particularly the myth that vaccines cause autism, a blogger by the 'nym of Prometheus taught me that autism and autism spectrum disorders (particularly by antivaccinationists and believers in the quackery known as "autism biomed") are conditions of developmental delay, not developmental stasis. Autistic children can and do exhibit improvement in their symptoms simply through growth and development. However, parents who subject their children to "autism biomed" quackery…
oracknows | January 22, 2013While I'm using my blog as an announcement platform today, I would be remiss not to mention that tomorrow is Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski's birthday, and the Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients are still raising money for St. Jude's Children's Hospital in order to try to get Dr. Burzynski to do something good for cancer patients for a change. The beauty of it is that, even if Burzynski declines, as is likely, there'll still be a nice big donation to a real cancer center that does real good for children with cancer, which is in marked contrast to Burzynski. Harriet Hall has joined in the…
oracknows | January 21, 2013Time really flies. It's hard to believe that the first national skeptical conference of the season is NECSS 2013 (The Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism), hosted by the New York City Skeptics and the New England Skeptical Society, is fast approaching. In fact, it's only a little more than two months away. The conference will be held in New York City on April 5-7. Sadly, that conflicts with the American Association for Cancer Research meeting, meaning that I'll be in Washington, DC that weekend and can't go. (As an aside, maybe anyone from the DC area who also can't go to NECSS and…
oracknows | January 20, 2013As I contemplated how I wanted to start the blogging week, I thought that I should probably again plug Bob Blaskiewicz's campaign to provide Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston doctor who for the last 35 years has been treating patients diagnosed with advanced stage and terminal cancers with something he calls antineoplastons (ANPs), with a most excellent "gift" for his 70th birthday. This he does despite the astounding lack of compelling evidence that ANPs are actually effective against cancer, none of which stops him from charging patients exorbitant amounts of money, sometimes upwards of…
oracknows | January 17, 2013Even though I've been at this skeptical blogging thing, particularly about "alternative" medicine, so long (eight years now) that I think I've seen it all, that nothing the quacks do can shock me any more. It's a foolish hubris, I admit, but, I hope, an understandable one after over eight years of blogging multiple times a week about science, skepticism, and quackery that can and has made my head spin. It is true that encountering something that gets my attention and truly knocks me on my posterior is getting rarer and rarer. It's not so rare that it doesn't still happen every now and then:…
oracknows | January 17, 2013I sense another disturbance in the antivaccine Force.
Yes, I realize that it was just a couple of days ago that I sensed a previous disturbance rippling through the antivaccine Force. That's when antivaccinationists brought David Kirby out of mothballs from whatever journalistic slime pit he's currently residing in to use every trick at his disposal to convince you that somehow the government has compensated two families of children for vaccine-induced autism when in fact he's playing the same game he's always played: Claiming that if any child who's ever been compensated by the National…
oracknows | January 16, 2013This is going to be uncharacteristically short, for me that is. I sometimes listen to NPR as I drive home from work, and I happened to be doing just that yesterday evening when I heard a story about the new Institute of Medicine report on vaccines and the vaccine schedule. (Stay tuned for my post on that in a few hours.) The report was crisp and summarized the findings of the report quite well. Then, at around what I know to be the three minute mark (now that the audio is up) I heard something most dismaying. Yes, believe it or not, for the "other side" of an issue for which there is no other…
oracknows | January 15, 2013Now that Trine Tsouderos no longer works for the Chicago Tribune, there aren't that many reliable generalist medical/science reporters around any more. For example, here in the U.S. there's Marilyn Marchionne at the AP, Gina Kolata of the New York Times, and then there's Sharon Begley, who used to be at Newsweek but is now at Reuters I'm having trouble thinking of others with national prominence, other than Nancy Snyderman, who has recently profoundly disappointed me with a fawning report on "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) that made it seem to be the greatest thing since sliced…
oracknows | January 14, 2013I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine Force, which is, of course, by definition the Dark Side.
Whenever I sense such a disturbance, there are a number of possible reactions that it provokes in me. One such reaction is alarm, as when antivaccine activists say something that is just clever enough to sound plausible enough that it might cause trouble. It never is, of course, but it often takes a close reading and some research to figure out what the game is and deconstruct the nonsense. Sometimes, my reaction is amusement, as when an antivaccine activist says something that is so hilariously…
oracknows | January 13, 2013Eric Merola doesn't much like me.
Actually, no one who is an apologist for Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, a.k.a. "Stan the Man," who over 30 years ago unleashed antineoplastons on unsuspecting cancer patients, much likes me. It's not surprising. As you might recall, antineoplastons are chemicals that Burzynski found in the urine of cancer patients and that (or so he claims). Claiming that antineoplastons were endogenous inhibitors of tumor growth made by the body and of which cancer patients are deficient, thus allowing cancer to grow, he embarked on a campaign to treat cancer patients with them.…
oracknows | January 13, 2013...you've received some well-deserved recognition!
I can't think of a more deserving up-and-coming antivaccine activist to be inducted into this most "prestigious" of groups of American Loons! I've written about Stagliano's science- and logic-challenged posts many times over the last few years, but it's good to see that others have noticed as well. From the citation:
Diagnosis: Ignorant, ardent loon who are on the verge of taking the anti-vaxx movement well into TimeCube territory. The fact that she is unable to avoid a fallacy in every other sentence she writes should not be taken to…
oracknows | January 11, 2013
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
There’s no cure, there’s no answer
Everything gives you cancer -
Joe Jackson
I don't write about nutrition as much as other topics because I'm not as knowledgeable about it as I am about, say, cancer, vaccines, and what constitutes good medical evidence. (I am, however, trying to become more knowledgeable.) Even so, I was thinking. After my post a week ago in which über-quack Joe Mercola unexpectedly gave a glowing introduction to a paean of praise for bacon and my post yesterday in which a credulous fellow by the…
oracknows | January 9, 2013About a year and a half ago, I applied a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence to a a clueless article about the the "triumph" of New Age medicine. The article channeled the worst fallacies of apologists for alternative medicine. Basically, its whole idea appeared to be that, even if most of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" is quackery (which it most certainly is), it doesn't matter because allegedly it's making patients better because its practitioners take the time to talk to them in a way that most doctors do not. In brief, the article was…
oracknows | January 8, 2013Remember Dr. Sin Hang Lee?
If you don't remember Lee, maybe you remember a while back, when the antivaccine group SaneVax touted findings that it claimed were devastating to Gardasil. Specifically, they claimed that there was vaccine-derived human papilloma virus DNA in Gardasi. Ring any bells yet? And it turns out that the guy who made this apparently horrific "discovery" was—you guessed it!—Dr. Sin Hang Lee. Back in 2011, Lee, apparently either funded by or working with SaneVax, "discovered" that there was DNA in his Gardasil. As I explained at the time, there was a lot less to this claim…
oracknows | January 8, 2013If there's one thing about "alternative" medicine, "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), or "integrative medicine" that's always puzzled me, it's just how gullible some practitioners must think their clients are. In some cases, they might know their customers every bit as well as a car salesman knows his clients or an author knows his readers, but in actuality most people who fall for alt-med are no more gullible than average. However, some words seem to impress more than ever, as promoters of alt-med scramble to appropriate impressive-sounding science terms into their woo. I've…