oracknows | December 2, 2011A while back I wrote a brief, snarky post about a bizarre hypothesis that I considered so risible as not to be worth applying my usual 1,500 to 3,000 words of not-so-Respectful Insolence to. My original post was in response to a press release announcing a book by Michael J. Dochniak and Denise H. Dunn entitled Vaccine Delivery and Autism (The Latex Connection). Basically, the book posits a ridiculous hypothesis that the Latex in some vaccine delivery systems is a cause of autism. Not long after I posted it, Mr. Dochniak himself showed up in my comments, and hilarity ensued. Boy, did it ever!…
oracknows | December 2, 2011I'm a cancer surgeon and have been since I finished my fellowship nearly 13 years ago. That is, of course, one big reason that, after I found myself drifting towards becoming a skeptic, it didn't take long for me to take an interest in "alternative medicine," in particular alternative medicine for cancer. Perhaps that's why I went a little bit crazy on Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski earlier this week for his "antineoplaston" therapy and his clinic's harassment of critical bloggers. As a result of that incident, I decided to keep my eye out even more than usual for clinics, websites, or practitioners…
oracknows | November 30, 2011As I said yesterday, it's time to take a break from blogging about Stanislaw Burzynski; that is, unless something new happens that I consider to be worth commenting on. Fear not, though. I will return to the subject. As I said yesterday, Burzynski is now pushing some sort of nonstandard "personalized gene-targeted therapy" in addition to his antineoplaston therapy.
In the meantime, it's back to business. I'm a bit tired, but I'm (almost) never too tired to analyze a claim made by a supporter of pseudoscience.
Amazingly, sometimes the gods of the blogosphere are kind and benevolent. They…
oracknows | November 29, 2011Remember yesterday how I said I would be following the "rule of three" in blogging about the Burzynski Clinic, its questionable practices in charging patients huge sums of money for dubious therapies, the even more dubious science behind his "antineoplaston therapy," and his shill Marc Stephens threatening bloggers with legal action in hilariously crude ways? In other words, in the tradition of comics and documentaries everywhere, I'd stop at three posts about Burzynski, at least for the moment.
I lied.
Well, no, actually I didn't lie. When I wrote yesterday's post, I fully planned on taking…
oracknows | November 28, 2011I've been thinking about the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. You remember the Holy Hand Grenade, don't you? It was in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where a cleric goes on and on about how "three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three."
Yesterday, I counted two and am now proceeding to three.
I figured that, after spending two posts on how Burzynski's minions and shills (in particular a man named Marc Stephens) have been making baseless legal threats…
oracknows | November 27, 2011Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, I was simultaneously alarmed and amused at how someone named Marc Stephens, who claims (although presents no evidence for his claim) that he represents the rogue physician and "researcher" Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, had taken to threatening skeptical bloggers who criticize Dr. Burzynski's highly dubious cancer therapy, a therapy Burzynski dubbed "antineoplastons." In particular, Mr. Stephens threatened a blogger by the name of Andy Lewis, whose nom de blog is Le Canard Noir and whose blog and website, The Quackometer, I've followed for years now. As a…
oracknows | November 25, 2011A common thread that runs through the activities of various antiscience cranks, quacks, charlatans, and denialists is an extreme aversion to criticism. In fact, in many cases their aversion to criticism is so extreme that a common reaction of cranks to even legitimate criticism is to try to shut that criticism down any way possible. Sometimes, this intimidation takes the form of harassment or attempts to get a critic fired from his job, as has happened with René Najera and yours truly. this takes the form of lawsuits or abuse of the legal process, as has been experienced by Dr. Paul Offit,…
oracknows | November 23, 2011One of the more depressing things I've seen coming from various practitioners of quackery is a tendency for them to mimic Médecins Sans Frontières (in English, Doctors Without Borders). You know Doctors Without Borders, don't you? It's a fantastic organization that brings volunteer physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals into disaster areas and war zones in order to bring health care to people who desperately need it regardless of politics or ideology. Unfortunately, because MSF is such an admirable group, quacks with good intentions but no effective remedies have mimicked…
oracknows | November 22, 2011I've spent nearly seven years and an enormous amount of verbiage writing about the difference between pseudoscience and science, between cranks and skeptics, between denialists and scientists. Along the way, I've identified a number of factors common to cranks and denialists. For example, two of the most prominent characteristics are a tendency to cherry pick studies and evidence and--shall we say?--a major "inconsistency" in how they deal with data. If a study appears to support their viewpoint, it doesn't matter how small it is, how preliminary it is, how poorly designed it is, or how weak…
oracknows | November 21, 2011One of the greatest gifts anyone can give is to donate his body to science after death. Such anatomic gifts contribute to the training of medical students, residents, and other medical professionals as well as being used for research that can contribute to the advancement of medical science. One of the things that makes an anatomic gift such a profound gift is that the donor usually has little control over what their body or body parts will be used for. There is, thus, more than a little trust in medical science involved in these gifts. When the deceased is a child, the donation of a child's…
oracknows | November 20, 2011Every so often, I come across something in the world of woo that leaves my jaw dangling from its joint in utter astonishment that anyone could think such a thing was a good idea. Sometimes these things are investigations into various paranormal phenomena. Sometimes, it's the latest anti-science denialist screed from a creationist. Other times, it's a contortion of science so egregious that I can't believe anyone would actually do it--or that anyone would actually mistake that woo for good science.
This time around, it's genomics that's being abused.
This is a topic that, although I don't…
oracknows | November 18, 2011I've heard it said (actually, I've said it myself) that if you don't have the science and evidence to back up your point of view, in order to persuade someone, make a movie. At least, this seems to be the philosophy of a number of cranks who have produced movies promoting pseudoscience over the last five years or so. The first one of these movies that really caught my attention was an anti-evolution, pro-"intelligent design" creationism documentary narrated by Ben Stein and released in 2008, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie was pure creationist propaganda, complete with Ben Stein…
oracknows | November 17, 2011When it rains it pours, as they say.
Yes, sometimes there's so much going on that I can't possibly blog about it all, particularly now that I've cut back a bit. This week seems to be turning into one of those weeks. Yesterday, I couldn't resist having a bit of fun with the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher when she released a seriously hypocritical and silly press release whining about how mistreated she thinks her organization, the Orwellian-named National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) has been because the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) had the audacity…
oracknows | November 16, 2011I've written about the infiltration of quackery into military medicine, beginning well over three years ago when I first noticed battlefield acupuncture and noticing how it's infiltrating the military, thanks primarily to one Col. (Dr.) Richard Niemtzow. Today, I found someone who put it into a video form. Be forewarned, though, that the video contains things that might not be safe for work, such as blood and guts and swearing. But, hey, it is the military:
This video reminds me way too much of my little fictional interlude that I used to introduce my original post about battlefield…
oracknows | November 15, 2011A couple of weeks ago, I sounded the alarm regarding a highly deceptive public service announcement/infomercial being run on some Delta Airlines flights, courtesy of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). That's the organization founded by the grand dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, who features prominently in the PSA. I call this PSA deceptive because, although it tries mightily to pass itself off as a reasonable series of strategies for avoiding catching influenza, in reality this PSA is a very sneaky and clever bit of anti-vaccine propaganda. Why do I say this…
oracknows | November 14, 2011As a skeptic and a blogger, my main interest has evolved to be the discussion of science-based medicine and how one can identify what in medicine is and is not based in science. Part of the reason for this is because of my general interest in skepticism dating back to my discovery that there actually are people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, which led to a more general interest in pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and other non-evidence-based and non-science-based viewpoints that now includes quackery, anti-vaccine nonsense, 9/11 "Truth," creationism, and anthropogenic global warming…
oracknows | November 13, 2011I suck at golf.
There was a time in my life when I golfed a lot. Unfortunately, I was pretty lousy at it. I tended to shoot around 120, and only once in my life do I ever recall breaking 100 for 18 holes. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, don't sweat it. Just realize that that's not very good. (A lower score is better, and par is usually somewhere around 72, depending on the golf course.) Of course, golf is hard. It's very, very hard, and because golf is so hard golfers are always on the lookout for something that will improve their score. It doesn't matter if we're…
oracknows | November 13, 2011This morning, I was forced to do something that I rarely do, namely shut down a comment thread and ban a particularly noxious troll for sockpuppetry. The post in question dealt with one Michael J. Dochniak and his ridiculous and scientifically unsupportable notion (I refuse to dignify it by calling it a "hypothesis") that Latex used in the packaging of some vaccines causes autism. In truth, I probably let that thread go on far longer than I should have. Also, I probably should have banned Mr. Dochniak a couple of months ago for repeating the same arguments again and again and again after…
oracknows | November 11, 2011I had been wondering why the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism had been gearing up the slime machine against Brian Deer lately. For example, former UPI reporter turned vaccine/autism cran Dan Olmsted has been attacking the BMJ. As you recall, the BMGpublished Brian Deer's latest revelations earlier this year when he quite pithily and correctly referred to the now infamous (not to mention fraudulent and consequently retracted) 1998 Lancet case series published by vaccine/autism quack and crank Andrew Wakefield "Piltdown medicine." Particularly curious are the more recent articles, which…
oracknows | November 8, 2011I've written about the concept of "misinformed" consent with respect to the anti-vaccine movement. To summarize, "misinformed consent" is a perversion of the concept of informed consent in which cranks claim to be championing true informed consent (and, by implication, that opponents have not) when in fact they are presenting a scientifically unsupportable assessment of the risks and benefits of an intervention. In the case of vaccines, anti-vaccine activists play up the risks of vaccines far beyond what science supports, attributing to them, for instance, risks of autism, autoimmune disease…