oracknows | February 28, 2012If there's one thing I've learned over the last seven years, it's that there are a handful of people in the "natural health" movement (a.k.a., quackery movement) who can reliably counted upon to bring home the crazy in spades. There is, of course the granddaddy of all conspiracy sites, Whale.to, and its creator John Scudamore, for whom no quackery is too quacky, no pseudoscience too ridiculous, and no conspiracy theory too outlandish. Truly, that is a high bar of crazy to surpass, but there are certainly people out there trying to do it. Perhaps the one I encounter the most is Mike Adams,…
oracknows | February 28, 2012Yesterday was a rough day for me; so I'll be uncharacteristically brief today.
As I've pointed out time and time again, these days, advocates of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) don't like it so much anymore when their preferred quackery is referred to as "CAM." Now the preferred term has--shall we say?--evolved to a happy term designed to paint their woo as being co-equal with real medicine: "integrative medicine" in a way that the term "CAM" does not. After all, CAM is "complementary," which implies that it's subsidiary, the icing on the cake so to speak, and it's "alternative…
oracknows | February 26, 2012Every so often, something happens that rekindles the need in me to discuss what, exactly, it means to be "antivaccine." As many of my readers know, if there's one thing about antivaccinationists, it's that they assiduously avoid ever admitting that they are antivaccinationists. In order to avoid having to make that admission, they'll go through all sorts of transparent rhetorical contortions to try to convince people that they are not antivaccine. The most common (and transparent) of these is a gambit I like to call "I'm not 'antivaccine'; I'm pro-safe vaccine" or "I'm a vaccine safety…
oracknows | February 24, 2012Back in September, I merrily applied a little not-so-Respectful Insolence to the service of deconstructing the overwhelmingly silly fear mongering by a group known as SANE Vax over the alleged discovery of HPV DNA in the HPV vaccine. SANE Vax, as you may recall, is a group founded by a woman named Norma Erickson dedicated to spreading misinformation about the HPV vaccine. If you peruse the SANE Vax website, you'll see that the common antivaccine tropes are all there; they're just directed mainly at the HPV vaccine. The hysterial fear mongering over the alleged discovery of DNA fragments of…
oracknows | February 23, 2012Any regular reader of this blog knows who Andrew Wakefield is. He's the British gastroenterologist who almost singlehandedly ignited a panic about the MMR vaccine (well, not quite single-handedly; the sensationalistic British press helped a lot) with his shoddy, fraudulent research linking the MMR vaccine to "autistic enterocolitis" and then later to autism itself. Ultimately, his support for non-science-based speculation (not to mention his unethical behavior) caught up with him, and he was "struck off," which is a lovely bit of British verbiage describing his having his license to practice…
oracknows | February 23, 2012There's something about the prefix "anti" that provokes all too many people, even some who consider themselves "skeptics," to clutch at their pearls and feel faint. Antivaccine? Oh, no, you can't say that! They're not "antivaccine"? Who could be so nutty as to be "antivaccine"? Even members of the antivaccine movement don't like the term because even they realize that to be antivaccine is akin to being "anti" Mom, apple pie, and America. So they come up with the defense that they are not "antivaccine" but rather "pro-safe vaccine." They'll come up with silly analogies about how being for…
oracknows | February 21, 2012If there's one thing I've learned during the last seven years about the antivaccine crowd invested in the idea that vaccines cause autism, it's that it reacts with extreme hostility to any sort of studies that cast doubt upon their pet idea that vaccines cause autism. That's somewhat understandable, given how much of their identity so many members of the antivaccine movement have invested in their idea, but not all studies that fail to support the central dogma of the antivaccine movement (i.e., that vaccines cause autism and are in general evil) are created equal, at least not with respect…
oracknows | February 20, 2012
Like many geeks, I enjoy The Big Bang Theory. I know, I know, you're shocked to hear that, but it's true. I've seen nearly every episode since the first season. Over the last couple of seasons, the male-centric show has been considerably improved by its move towards more of an ensemble cast that includes two new female characters: Bernadette Rostenkowski, played by Melissa Rauch, who is Howard's girlfriend, and Amy Farrah Fowler, played by Mayim Bialik, who is Sheldon's girlfriend. Both characters are smart and in many ways as geeky as the guys, but in a different way.
Oddly enough, I…
oracknows | February 19, 2012If there's one thing that purveyors of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)--or, the preferred term these days, "integrative medicine" (IM)--and hospital administrators seem to agree on, it's that "patient satisfaction" (whatever that means) is very, very important. Hospital administrators live and die by patient satisfaction surveys, in particular a common measurement derived from Press-Ganey surveys. In fact, Press-Ganey itself sells its services as "driving performance excellence" in health care. The inherent assumption is that if patients are satisfied then they are doing a good…
oracknows | February 16, 2012Since 2012 was rung in a month and a half ago, I've been writing a lot more about placebo medicine than I have in a while. Specifically, I've written a lot more about placebo effects than usual. This proliferation of posts on the topic was sparked by how Harvard University's very own not-a-PhD faculty, credulous promoter of acupuncture and all things "integrative medicine," and generally clever propagandist for woo, Ted Kaptchuk seemed, like Elvis, to be everywhere for a while. The message he was spreading was, although he didn't admit it or put it that way, a response to the growing body of…
oracknows | February 15, 2012It's been a while since I mentioned Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston doctor who has somehow managed over the last thirty-plus years to treat cancer patients with something he calls "antineoplastons" without ever actually producing strong evidence that they actually cure patients, increase the chances of long-term survival, or even improve disease-free progression. Although there was a tiny bit of prior plausibility behind the concept--albeit only very tiny--back in the 1980s, the relentless drip, drip, drip of negative evidence, coupled with Burzynski's failure to advance his therapy…
oracknows | February 14, 2012One of the most potent strategies used by promoters of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)--or, as its proponents like to call it these days, "integrative medicine" (IM)--is in essence an argumentum ad populum; i.e., an appeal to popularity. Specifically, they like to use the variant of argumentum ad populum known as the "bandwagon effect," in which they try to persuade patients and physicians that they should get with the IM program because, in essence, everyone else is doing it and it's sweeping the nation. Not coincidentally, this is one type of method of persuasion much favored…
oracknows | February 13, 2012As I survey the lack of reason that infests--nay, permeates every fiber of--my country, sometimes I despair. Whether it's because of the freak fest that the race for the Republican nomination has become, with each candidate seemingly battling to prove he can bring home the crazier crazy than any of the others, or antiscience running rampant in the form of evolution rejectionism, antivaccine lunacy, and anthropogenic global warming (AGW( denialism, it's hard for skeptics and rationalists not to be depressed. Personally, however, I always looked to the north, to Canada, for a little more sense…
oracknows | February 12, 2012If there's one form of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) that I find more tolerable than most, it's massage therapy. The reason, of course, is that, whatever else anyone claims about massage, there's no doubt that it feels good.
All too often, however, massage therapists ruin a perfectly good massage by imposing pseudoscientific and quack claims on it, such as claims that they are stimulating acupressure points or their adoption of the language of "energy healing." So it was with a bit of trepidation (but also more than a bit of interest) that I took a look at some…
oracknows | February 10, 2012Work called last night. (It happens.) Basically, I had two deadlines for two big things (finishing reviewing the grants assigned to me for study section and a major writeup for a project for my job). Unfortunately, both of them were today. I realized as I perused old posts that I hadn't reposted this one in over five years. So, unless you're a long time reader, it's definitely new to you. More importantly, it reminds me that I don't write about thins like this much anymore. Certainly I rarely do personal anecdotes or straight medical blogging much anymore. Maybe I should do more.
[NOTE: This…
oracknows | February 8, 2012There are times when I want to fall down on my knees and give thanks for certain cranks. I mean, where would my blogging material come from, were it not for antivaccine loons, quacks, cranks, creationists, and animal rights terrorists providing me with an unending stream of blog fodder? Were they all to disappear, I'd be reduced to blogging about puppies or music or something, and, trust me, you wouldn't want that. Of course, my readership would flee me faster than a advocates of gay marriage flee the Republican Party; so I guess it wouldn't matter. I know which side my bread is buttered on;…
oracknows | February 7, 2012I was going to write about that article about massage therapy and the gene expression changes it causes, but when I went to look up the actual paper and found out, to my great disappointment, that our institution still doesn't have a subscription to the journal in which it was published. So, while I'm waiting for a friend to send me a copy, I can't help but do a quick and uncharacteristically short posts (for me) discussing a tidbits of information that I found quite heartening. Unfortunately, it involves a person every bit as vile as the antivaccine activists who so hate vaccines that they'…
oracknows | February 6, 2012Way back in the day, when I first encountered antivaccine views in that wretched Usenet swamp of pseudoscience, antiscience, and quackery known as misc.health.alternative, there was one particular antivaccine lie that disturbed me more than just about any other. No, it wasn't the claim that vaccines cause autism, the central dogma of the antivaccine movement. Even ten years ago, that wasn't a particularly difficult myth to refute, and, with the continuing torrent of negative studies failing to find even a whiff of a hint of a whisper of a correlation between vaccination and autism, refuting…
oracknows | February 5, 2012It's amazing how fast six months can pass, isn't it? Well, almost six months, anyway, as it was five and a half months ago that I wrote about a particularly execrable example of quackademic medicine in the form of a study that actually looked at an "energy healing" modality known as "energy chelation" as a treatment for cancer chemotherapy-induced fatigue. Actually, the study design itself wasn't so bad, leaving aside the utter ludicrousness of the concept of "energy chelation." Rather, it was how the authors spun interpreted their results that set my head spinning. Surprisingly, a letter to…
oracknows | February 3, 2012A couple of weeks ago, I made the observation that there seems to have been a--shall we say?--realignment in one of the central arguments that proponents of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM) make. Back in the day (say, a few years ago), such CAM practitioners and apologists used to try very, very hard to argue that their modalities had actual efficacy, that they had actual, measurable effects that made them medicine rather than woo. Never mind that even back then they had been trying for at least a couple of decades to come up with preclinical and…