oracknows | March 25, 2012As sometimes happens, last week I let myself get tied up writing multiple posts about a single topic, namely the promotion of an antivaccine movie by a school board president in California, apparently as part of an attempt to influence California legislators who are considering a law that will make philosophical exemptions for school vaccine mandates easier to obtain. As a result I didn't get around to blogging about something else that happened last week. It's a topic near and dear to my heart as a cancer surgeon. On second thought, perhaps "near and dear" is exactly the wrong way to…
oracknows | March 23, 2012I've discussed the concept of "misinformed consent" multiple times before. Quacks in general, particularly the "health freedom" movement proclaim their dedication to "informed consent." "All we're asking for," they will say, "is informed consent." The antivaccine movement in particular demands "informed consent" about vaccines. Be it Barbara Loe Fisher, the bloggers at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, or any of a number of antivaccine warriors, demanding "informed consent" seems to be every bit as much of the antivaccine arsenal as the "toxins gambit" or ranting about "fetal cells"…
oracknows | March 22, 2012I'll give the Canary Party credit for one thing, if credit you can consider it. It's persistent in its promotion of antivaccine pseudoscience.
Somehow, someone at Current TV decided that it would be a good idea to show an utterly unbalanced, utterly cranky, utterly propagandistic "documentary" (The Greater Good) that seeks to demonize vaccines as the cause of autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune disease, and, apparently tooth decay, too. (I'm joking about the last one--but just barely.) I wrote about its misinformation, cherry picking, and relying on anecdotes rather than science…
oracknows | March 21, 2012San Ramon, we have a problem.
The other day, I laid some not-so-Respectful Insolence on a clueless school board president in San Ramon Valley, California, named Greg Marvel. What merited a heapin' helpin' of what Orac does so well was Marvel's use of school board stationery to endorse a stinking, steaming turd of a movie that is really nothing more than antivaccine propaganda wrapped in false "balance" about vaccines. The movie I'm referring to is The Greater Good, and it's going to be shown on Current TV this Saturday, followed by an online chat with the film's producers. Basically, the…
oracknows | March 20, 2012Sometimes you find good skepticism in strange places. One example of this has been Cracked.com. Normally, Cracked.com is a humor site based on the magazine that I used to read sometimes back in 1970s. Unfortunately, the magazine folded several years ago, but the website lives on. For example, Cracked.com once did a snarky article making fun of the "heroes" of the antivaccine movement and contrasting them to "villains" like (of course!) Paul Offit. It even featured for emphasis the infamous "baby eating" poster that Age of Autism ran a couple of years ago that featured Steve Novella, Paul…
oracknows | March 19, 2012A science-based blogger's work is never done, apparently.
I'll show you what I mean in a minute. But first, I just have to make a simple observation. Pseudoscience, be it quackery, evolution denial, denial of anthropogenic global warming, antivaccine nonsense, or other forms of pseudoscience, apparently never dies. No matter how many times it's slapped down, no matter how often and how vigorously it's refuted, it always seems to rise again. In fact, I used to liken pseudoscience and quackery to zombies, but that's a bad analogy. After all, in most zombie lore (as told in books and movies) a…
oracknows | March 18, 2012About a month ago, I wrote about a study that looked at metrics of patient satisfaction and compared them to hard outcomes often used to evaluate quality of care, including frequency of emergency room usage, frequency of hospitalization, and overall mortality. Even though these days there appears to be an implicit assumption that increased patient satisfaction comes about as a result of better quality of care (or at least that patient satisfaction correlates with quality of care), this study found almost exactly the opposite. Patients who were in the highest quartile for patient satisfaction…
oracknows | March 16, 2012The Autism File bills itself as a magazine dealing with all aspects of autism. In reality, it's basically a crank magazine dedicated to autism biomedical quackery plus a generous helping of antivaccine fear mongering. In fact, this passage should tell you all you need to know about the publication:
Autism File is a lifestyle guide to achieving better health. It is written with your needs in mind but is not a substitute for consulting with your physician or other health care providers. The publisher and authors are not responsible for any adverse effects or consequences resulting from the use…
oracknows | March 15, 2012If there's one quack who both amuses and appalls me at the same time, it's Robert O. Young. You remember Robert O. Young, don't you? He's the guy who thinks that all disease is caused by excess acid. I've written about him quite a few times over the last several years. For instance, he amused me when he declared that cancers are all liquids, and this liquid is the "toxic acidic waste product of metabolism or energy consumption." In fact, he goes beyond that by saying that the tumor making up the cancer is the body's protective mechanism to encapsulate "spoiled" or "poisonous" cells. And what…
oracknows | March 13, 2012There are quite a few reasons why I blog. After all, to crank out between 500 and 3,000 words a day, with an average of somewhere around 1,500 by my reckoning) takes quite a commitment. One of the main reasons that I do this is to combat the irrationality that permeates the world, and, since I know medicine, I tend to concentrate mostly on medicine, although I certainly do not limit myself to medicine. Still, over the last seven years I've noticed myself writing less and less about other topics and more and more about medicine. It's been quite a while, for instance, since I've written about…
oracknows | March 12, 2012"Patient-centered care."
It's the new buzzword in patient care. Personally, I find the term mor ethan a little Orwellian in that it can mean so many things. Basically, it's a lot like Humpty Dumpty when he says to Alice, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." So it is with "patient-centered care." It's such a wonderfully--shall we say?--flexible term. That's why I took more than a little interest a week and a half ago when I picked up the New England Journal of Medicine and saw in the Perspective section three articles about "patient-centered"…
oracknows | March 12, 2012I don't know what it is about the beginning of a year. I don't know if it's confirmation bias or real, but it sure seems that something big happens early every year in the antivaccine world. Consider. As I pointed out back in February 2009, in rapid succession Brian Deer reported that Andrew Wakefield had not only had undisclosed conflicts of interest regarding the research that he did for his now infamous 1998 Lancet paper but that he had falsified data. Of course, in response Keith Olbermann was totally played by the antivaccine movement, resulting in some truly mind-numbingly dumb…
oracknows | March 11, 2012Having a reasonably popular blog is a cool thing because at times I can do things like what I'm about to do. I'd like to start the week off with a little bit of crowdsourcing. Earlier this week, a reader wrote to me at my not-so-super-secret other blog with a request that concluded:
In short, I was wondering if...you...would be able to refer me to a scientific or psuedo-scientific article where the abstract completely misrepresents the article or the conclusion doesn't fit the analysis/data. The reason is that I'm writing is that I'm currently in my third year at [REDACTED], and currently I'…
oracknows | March 9, 2012Thanks to the partying and backslapping going on in the antivaccine movement over the reversal of the decision of the British General Medical Council to strike Professor John Walker-Smith off of the medical record, after a brief absence vaccines are back on the agenda of this blog. Antivaccine cranks view the decision as a vindication and exoneration of antivaccine guru Andrew Wakefield even though it is nothing of the sort and is in fact a decision based on questionable (at best) scientific reasoning. Actually, as some of my commenters have pointed out, Justice Mitting applied legal…
oracknows | March 7, 2012I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine crankosphere.
Actually, maybe "disturbance" is the wrong word. Unabashed whooping it up is closer to correct. High-fiving is perhaps a better term. Or maybe partying like it's 2005. The question, of course, is what is the inciting event was that sparked such widespread rejoicing in the antivaccine world. I'll give you a hint. It has to do with the hero of the antivaccine movement, the man who arguably more than anyone else is responsible for the MMR scare that drove down MMR vaccine uptake in the UK to the point where measles, once vanquished, came…
oracknows | March 6, 2012If there's one thing that practitioners of dubious cancer therapies rely upon, it's testimonials. If there's one such practitioner who really, really relies on testimonials, it's Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, founder of the Burzynski Clinic. Dr. Burzynski is known for what he refers to as "antineoplaston" therapy (which he massively oversells and is currently rebranding as sodium phenylbutyrate) and a highly dubious "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy." The results of these testimonials are patients from all over the world organizing fundraisers, or, as I put it, harnessing the generosity…
oracknows | March 5, 2012Remember Gayle DeLong?
Last summer, DeLong published a paper in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, entitled A Positive Association found between Autism Prevalence and Childhood Vaccination uptake across the U.S. Population. As I pointed out at the time, it showed nothing of the sort. Besides botching the introduction by citing a panoply of studies by luminaries of the antivaccine movement, such as Mark Blaxill, Mark and David Geier, Russell Blaylock, and Laura Hewitson, DeLong performed a simplistic analysis that had "ecological fallacy" written all over it in such big…
oracknows | March 4, 2012A fascination with quackery was one of the things that inspired me to start this blog. Some of it was disbelief that anyone could take some of the modalities that I write about seriously. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples of this reaction was when I first learned that there were people who are actually antivaccine. I'm sorry (well, no I'm not), antivaccine views are utter hogwash, and there's no good evidence that they they cause autism. There aren't fetal parts in vaccines, nor are there deadly toxins. What chemicals that are there are not dangerous. Moving on to the broader area of…
oracknows | March 2, 2012I was originally going to write about an amazing article that appeared in the NEJM today, but then, as happens all too often, something more compelling caught my eye. Unfortunately, it's compelling in exactly the wrong way. It's infuriating and saddening, all at the same time. It's also yet another example of how it's so very, very difficult to blog about these cases. Yes, unfortunately, it's Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski again in the news, and this time around he's managed to snare yet another unfortunate family into believing the hype about his "antineoplastons," his "personalized, gene-targeted…
oracknows | March 1, 2012I've always been reluctant to attribute antiscientific attitudes to one political persuasion or another--and justly so, or so I thought. While it's true that antiscience on the right is definitely more prominent these days, with the Republican candidates conducting virtual seminars on how to deny established science. Evolution? They don't believe in it because, apparently, Jesus told them not to. Anthropogenic global warming? they don't buy that, either, because to admit that human activity is resulting in significant climate change would be to be forced to concede that industry isn't an…