oracknows | June 2, 2011Orac note: This is an updated post that appeared a few months ago. Events occurred that led me to think it would be a good idea simply to expand and update it.
It's been a recurring theme on this blog to discuss and dissect the infiltration of quackademic medicine into our medical schools. Whether it be called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM), its infiltration into various academic medical centers has been one of the more alarming developments I've noted over the last several years. The reason is that "integrative" medicine is all too often in…
oracknows | June 1, 2011Even though I was only in junior high and high school back in the 1970s, because I was already turning into a science geek I remember Senator William Proxmire (D-WI). In particular, I remember his Golden Fleece awards. These were "awards" designed to highlight what he saw as wasteful government spending, targeting, for instance, the use of taxpayer funds to fly over 1,000 officers to a reunion of the Tailhook Association or financing the construction of an 800- foot limestone replica of the Great Wall of China in Bedford, Indiana. Others, although they sounded on the surface to be wasteful,…
oracknows | May 31, 2011I've caught some flak before over things I've written about the almost certainly nonexistent link between cell phones and cancer. Actually, it's not the kind of flak you probably think, unless you've been a long time reader and remember the relevant posts. You'd think it would be believers attacking the mean old skeptic for denying a link between cell phone radiation and cancer, thus making me (obviously) a shill for big telecom. Actually, it was flak from one physicist and at least a couple of skeptics, who didn't like that I actually left open the small possibility that it could be possible…
oracknows | May 30, 2011Why is it that so many bloggable items tend to pop up right before holidays? Whatever the reason, whether my perception that this is the case is accurate or simply the result of confirmation bias on my part, last Friday a little tidbit of popped up that seriously tempted me to blog about it. But I was good (mostly). I resisted, figuring that, first, readership plummets during holiday weekends anyway and, second, anything worth giving an Orac-style dissection to will still be worth giving an Orac-style dissection to three days later. If it isn't, then it probably wasn't worth the full Orac…
oracknows | May 30, 2011Today's a holiday here in the U.S. You'd think that I'd be taking it easy, but, sadly, thanks to the insatiable needs of the NIH grant monster, today, as I was doing most of the day Saturday and part of the day yesterday, will be working on grants; that is, when I don't take a couple of hours to get that jungle of a lawn that surrounds my house mowed. (Thanks to the almost daily downpours producing the wettest spring I can remember, "jungle" is a fairly accurate term to describe our yard at the moment.) Despite all this, I would still be remiss if I didn't take a little time to followup on my…
oracknows | May 29, 2011It's happened again.
Remember how I've said time and time again that the anti-vaccine movement is very much like a religion, a cult even? One of the key attributes of religion is an intolerance for heretics, apostates, and unbelievers. The usual approach to unbelievers is either to try to convert them and then, failing that, to shun them (fortunately in most civilized countries Inquisition-like reactions are no longer common) or to skip the attempt to convert them and jump straight to the shunning. More evidence of just how true that is was presented on a silver platter to me at the anti-…
oracknows | May 27, 2011I was debating what to blog about last night, and it wasn't easy. We're in the midst of yet another embarrassment of riches, as far as topics relevant to this blog go. Then I noticed something that I considered to be quite appropriate, given that we are now right in the middle of the yearly autism quackfest known as Autism One in Chicago. This week, Nature published an issue with a special section devoted specifically to vaccines. The timing seemed just too deliciously appropriate to ignore. Think of it. In Chicago (well, Lombard), there is a collection of anti-vaccine cranks meeting to…
oracknows | May 25, 2011Many are the times I've referred to homeopathy as The One Quackery To Rule Them All. Because homeopathic remedies diluted greater than 12 C (12 serial hundred-fold dilutions) have been diluted more than Avagadro's number, they are incredibly unlikely to have even a single molecule of starting compound in them. That makes them water. Given that the vast majority of homeopathic remedies are, in fact, only water, they are the perfect quackery, and any effects due to homeopathy are nonspecific and placebo effects. More recently, I've pointed out that, because you can't have naturopathy without…
oracknows | May 25, 2011It's that time of year again!
No, I'm not referring to the unofficial start of summer here in the U.S., namely the Memorial Day holiday, although that is fast approaching. In fact, it's only five days away. No, I'm referring to something that, beginning today, will blight my favorite metro area (Chicago) for the next few days. I'm referring to the anti-vaccine quackfest that starts this morning in Lombard, IL and is known as Autism One. As long as I can remember blogging (OK, maybe for the last four or five years), as Memorial Day rolls around, I can't help but get that sinking feeling as the…
oracknows | May 24, 2011A couple of weeks ago, the anti-vaccine movement took a swing for the fences and, as usual, made a mighty whiff that produced a breeze easily felt in the bleachers. In brief, a crew of anti-vaccine lawyers named headed by Mary Holland, co-author of Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children, published a highly touted (by Generation Rescue and other anti-vaccine groups, that is) "study" claiming to "prove" that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) had actually compensated children for autism.…
oracknows | May 23, 2011Let's face it, Dr. Andrew Weil is a rock star in the "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM) movement. He is one of its founders, at least a founder of the its most modern iteration, and I am hard-pressed to think of anyone who did more in the early days of the CAM/IM movement, back before it ever managed to achieve a modicum of unearned respectability, to popularize CAM. In fact, no physician that I can think of has over the course of his lifetime done more to promote the rise of quackademic medicine than Dr. Weil. The only forces greater than Dr. Weil…
oracknows | May 22, 2011I get it. Seriously, I really do. Advertising is a deal with the devil. I understand that and have come to accept it--to a point. For example, I can (sort of) tolerate ads for Cancer Treatment Centers of America showing up on ScienceBlogs; I even understand that outside of those of us who promote science-based medicine CTCA isn't considered to be that bad. However, ads for homeopathy really, really irritated me, as I mentioned on Friday. It gets even worse than that, though. As if ads for homeopathy and human growth hormone anti-aging quackery weren't enough, what popped up earlier to mock…
oracknows | May 20, 2011I'm a dog lover. I love dogs as pets and can't imagine my life without having a dog as a pet. When our dog Echo died unexpectedly of a particularly nasty form of cancer at 8 years of age, I was devastated. Our current dog is a great dog, and quite the character.
But what would I do if I were one of those fundamentalist Christians who apparently believe that we are at most 26 hours from the Rapture? (Or maybe not. No one said what time zone is the time zone that determines when the Rapture occurs.) I'd be whiffed straight up to heaven, but what about my dog? He'd be left to fend for himself!…
oracknows | May 20, 2011Apparently something's going on here on ScienceBlogs. It's something that I don't like at all. You, my readers, have been informing me of it. Oddly enough, it also jibes with potential blogging material that appeared on that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post. You'll see what I'm talking about in a moment. Suffice it to say that it is not a confluence that makes me happy. It's not even a confluence that amuses me. Rather, it's a confluence that should never, ever happen. But happen it has.
It began with advertisements that have been popping up. Unfortunately, after a long…
oracknows | May 19, 2011Well, well, well, well.
Remember how recently autism quack Dr. Mark Geier finally ran afoul of Maryland's medical board for subjecting autistic children to unethical and potentially dangerous treatments with Lupron? Briefly, his license was suspended on an emergency basis, and, as a result, a lot of attention was brought to bear not just on the father, but on his son David Geier as well, who had been working with his father for years and, to all appearances, practicing medicine without a license. Personally, ever since I first learned of Mark and David Geier's dubious medicine six years ago,…
oracknows | May 18, 2011One of the stranger Internet-based quackery phenomena of the last decade is Morgellon's disease. This is a topic I haven't visited that much on this blog, its having last come up in a big way a little more than a year ago, when I discussed it in the context of Dr. Rolando Arafiles and the other quackery he was promoting. This led to extreme unhappiness on the part of self-proclaimed Morgellons disease "expert" Marc Neumann, who later bombarded me with threatening e-mail rants. In any case, whatever Morgellons disease is, its cause is almost certainly not what patients think it is, namely the…
oracknows | May 17, 2011Remember Robert O. Young?
He's the purveyor of only the finest quackery. Note that, by "finest," I mean the most highly entertaining, the sort of utter twaddle that makes me laugh out loud when I read it. Whether it's his claim that alkalinization is the cure for basically all disease, his characterizing sepsis as not being due to bacterial infection, his description of cancer as a mechanism to protect the body from "rotten cells" spoiled by acid and liquified, or his nonsensical attacks on Andrew Weil (his being one of the only men who can make Weil look reasonable by comparison), Robrt O.…
oracknows | May 16, 2011Remember dichloroacetate, also known as DCA?
This is a relatively simple compound that showed promise in rodent models of cancer four years ago, leading to an Internet meme that "scientists cure cancer, but no one notices." It also lead to scammers trying to take advantage of desperately ill cancer patients. The whole sordid story is detailed in my series of posts, the most recent of which I wrote about a year ago and link to here. I've also appended a list of every post I've written on the subject since I first discovered DCA in January 2007. It's a story of hope, fascinating cancer biology…
oracknows | May 16, 2011The anti-vaccine movement is a frequent topic on this blog, sometimes to the point where it seems to take over the blog for days (or even weeks) at a time and I cry for respite. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which being that the anti-vaccine movement is one of the most dangerous forms of pseudoscience, a form of quackery that, unlike most forms of quackery, endangers those who do not partake of it by breaking down herd immunity and paving the way for the resurgence of previously vanquished diseases. However, anti-vaccine beliefs share many other aspects with other…
oracknows | May 15, 2011First Oz, now this. Too bad Dr. Novella's appearance was so short:
At least they got Banachek to do a quick and dirty trial that helped to demonstrate that these bracelets do not work. Unfortunately, the power of belief is strong; several of the people who underwent the testing still wanted to fork over $30 for a cheap piece of plastic.
That is what skeptics are up against.