oracknows | August 8, 2011Over the years that I've been following the anti-vaccine movement, I've become familiar with typical narratives that reporters use when reporting on the vaccine fears stirred up by anti-vaccine activists. One narrative is the "brave maverick doctor" narrative, in which an iconoclastic quack (such as Mark Geier or Andrew Wakefield, for example) is portrayed fighting a lonely battle against the scientific orthodoxy. This particular narrative is extremely popular because it feeds into the story of the "underdog," coupled with a healthy disrespect of the powers that be, particularly the…
oracknows | August 6, 2011Here's blast from the past.
Interestingly, this doesn't exaggerate all that much...
oracknows | August 5, 2011I admire Brian Deer. I really do. He's put up with incredible amounts of abuse and gone to amazing lengths to unmask the vaccine quack Andrew Wakefield, the man whose fraudulent case series published in The Lancet thirteen years ago launched a thousand quack autism remedies and, worst of all, contributed to a scare over the MMR vaccine that is only now beginning to abate. Yes, Andrew Wakefield produced a paper that implied (although Wakefield was very careful not to say explicitly) that the MMR vaccine caused an entity that later became known as "autistic enterocolitis" and later implied that…
oracknows | August 4, 2011Now this is some seriously funny stuff.
Anyone who's been reading this blog a while knows my opinion of Deepak Chopra. Basically, he's the quackiest of the quantum quacks, the godfather of quantum woo, the one woo-meister to rule them all. He did it first and did it "best" (if you can call it that), in the process garnering a devoted following of people with far more "spirituality" than understanding of science. All it took was a unrelenting abuse of quantum physics, a Lamarckian misunderstanding of evolution, combined with a bit of old-fashioned Cartesian mind-body dualism, all thrown into…
oracknows | August 3, 2011...the results aren't pretty.
If there's one thing about anti-vaccine loons that I've come to learn over the last decade or so, it's that when they think they're being clever, they're really not. Exhibit A for this case follows:
Yes, courtesy of a particularly brain dead anti-vaccine website (and, compared to Age of Autism, that's saying something), all we have in the video above is a rewarmed "toxins gambit." How to find toxins in 5 seconds or less? It's more like how to find toxic ignorance in five seconds or less. The guy who came up with is video is probably terrified of salt because it…
oracknows | August 2, 2011File this under "Well, duh!"
In thinking about "alternative" medicine, occasionally I contemplate the deepest, most profound questions having to do with health and healing, the difference between science-based medicine and evidence-based medicine, and how to maximize the therapeutic effect of scientifically validated treatments. Other times, I contemplate the question of just what is, based on logic and basic science alone, the most ridiculous "alternative medicine" therapy of all time.
Certainly, there are many contenders. For example, there is homeopathy, which is basically nothing more…
oracknows | August 2, 2011One of the very first themes I started hammering on in this blog, dating back to its very inception, is the analysis of alternative medicine cancer testimonials. One reason was (and is) that I take care of cancer patients and do research into developing new treatments for a living. Another reason is that, to the average lay person, most of whom don't have much of an understanding of cancer, alternative medicine cancer testimonials can sound extremely convincing.
For example, if you didn't know that breast cancer can have a highly variable course spreading out over years, Kim Tinkham's claim…
oracknows | July 31, 2011As hard as it is to believe, I've been blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense and autism quackery since early 2005. Before that, I had been a regular on the misc.health.alternative newsgroup, where I had also encountered anti-vaccine pseudoscience, but the topic had not been a top priority for me. In fact, when I started this blog back in late 2004, I did not imagine at that time that I would somehow end up becoming one of the "go-to" bloggers for taking on anti-vaccine nonsense. Yet somehow I did, and dealing with the misinformation, lies, and pseudoscience of the anti-vaccine movement has…
oracknows | July 29, 2011It's been around four years now since I first wrote a post about what I now like to call the "toxins gambit" favored by anti-vaccine loons. This particular gambit consists of finding scary-sounding chemicals in vaccines, such as formaldehyde, and then trying to stoke fear of vaccines based on their presence. This gambit, whether invoked through ignorance (which is common) or disingenuousness (which, I suspect, is even more common) is a blatant appeal to fear of chemicals that depends upon the average person's ignorance that, for example, formaldehyde is a normal byproduct of metabolism and of…
oracknows | July 28, 2011Once upon a time, there was quackery. It was the term used to refer to medical practices that were not supported by evidence and were ineffective and potentially harmful. Physicians understood that modalities such as homeopathy, reflexology, and various "energy healing" (i.e., faith healing) methodologies were based either on prescientific vitalism, magical thinking, and/or on science that was at best incorrect or grossly distorted. More importantly, they weren't afraid to say so.
Quacks did not think this good.
Then, sometime a few decades ago, supporters of quackery decided that they would…
oracknows | July 27, 2011The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace.
I know, I know. I say that a lot, but it's only because it is, alas, so very, very true and so very, very distressing to supporters of science-based medicine. It's not as though I haven't written about it many, many times over the last six and a half years; indeed, it's become a major theme of this blog and at least one other blog that regular readers here might be familiar with. Whether it be the American Medical Students Association (AMSA) pitching woo, Georgetown going beyond electives in "complementary and alternative medicine" (…
oracknows | July 26, 2011Yesterday, I wrote about how two anti-vaccine activists, Barbara Loe Fisher and Joe Mercola, were unhappy that bloggers targeted their advertisement that they put on the CBS Times Square JumboTron for a letter-writing campaign to try to persuade CBS Outdoors to do the right thing and stop selling ad time to groups who promote a philosophy that is a threat to public health. Thats why I have to love it when by coincidence a paper is released that provides yet one more example of the benefits of vaccination. In this case, it even deals with one of the "lesser" vaccines. Well, it's not really a "…
oracknows | July 25, 2011Sadly, this isn't too far from the truth when it comes to some of these anti-vaccine doctors:
Actually, it's too generous. My only criticism of this video is that the mother with the child with suspected pertussis wasted more time with this idiot than was wise.
oracknows | July 24, 2011I must admit, I'm surprised that it took so long for this to happen.
Remember back in April? Three months ago, uber-quack (in my opinion) Joe Mercola teamed up with the grand dame of the anti-vaccine movement Barbara Loe Fisher of the misnamed National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) to run a "public service announcement" on the CBS JumboTron in Times Square. Here is the ad:
To recap, yes, I know that the ad itself appears relatively innocuous. Certainly that's what Joe Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher argue, because all it says is "Vaccines: Know the Risks" followed by "Vaccination: Your…
oracknows | July 22, 2011Et tu, Consumer Reports?
Since I was a teenager, I've intermittently read Consumer Reports, relying on it for guidance in all manner of purchase decisions. CR has been known for rigorous testing of all manner of consumer products and the rating of various services, arriving at its rankings through a systematic testing method that, while not necessarily bulletproof, has been far more organized and consistent than most other ranking systems. True, I haven't always agreed with CR's rankings of products and services about which I know a lot, but at the very least CR has often made me think about…
oracknows | July 21, 2011Oh, geez.
You might have noticed that I haven't written much about Jenny McCarthy in a while. The reason is fairly obvious. She seems to have faded into the background as far as her previous promotion of a vaccine-autism link. Three years ago, she was leading marches on Washington in which anti-vaccine activists claiming not to be anti-vaccine but "pro-safe vaccine." Today, even though she remains nominally head of anti-vaccine crank organization, Generation Rescue, she's clearly been making an effort to be seen as "respectable" and to downplay that anti-vaccine message that she used to…
oracknows | July 20, 2011It appears that while TAM9 was dominating all my extracurricular, non-job-related attention, with my having to get ready to give a talk, I failed to notice another thing besides the placebo/asthma paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine last Thursday. But fear not. If it's important (to me, at least, and hopefully to you too), I'll eventually see it, allowing me to toss off a jaunty, "Better late than never!" and then launch into a topic, even if I'm a week late. So it is this time around, except that the topic is so big that it might require more than one post, perhaps spread…
oracknows | July 19, 2011Since I was still recovering from TAM9 last night and crashed on the couch at around 9 PM, I didn't have time for one of my usual logorrheic posts. I did, however, have time to take note of an update on a story I started covering six years ago. One of the greatest things about having a long running blog (six and a half years) is that sometimes, after not having heard anything for a long time, I'll be surprised by new information on a story I commented on years ago and can update my readers. So it is with this rather bizarre story about two teenaged girls who formed the group Prussian Blue…
oracknows | July 17, 2011Note: I just got back from TAM; so if you happened to see a different version of this post somewhere else, now you know why.
Last week while I was at TAM, a study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). It is another beautiful example of how proponents of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) are able to spin even hugely negative results into something that supports CAM. Because I was at TAM, I didn't actually notice the article at first, but notice it I did eventually. Upon seeing it, my first question was: What on earth are the editors of NEJM smoking. Oddly enough,…
oracknows | July 16, 2011...is that I haven't been able to go and see the last Harry Potter movie yet. My wife and I will probably go to see it next weekend. In the meantime, while I do the final preparations for our panel, I must admit, as being an uber-fan of The Lord of the Rings since I was around 13 and also being a fan of the Harry Potter series, this gave me a chuckle:
This one was close, but I think Dumbledore took down Gandalf--albeit just barely, thanks to the line:
I'll expecto my patronum on your face, you little snitch
And when I'm finished Imma fly like it's quidditch.
Yes, I know this is frivolous…