oracknows | February 18, 2011Here's a chance for some skeptical activism if you happen to live in New York and its environs. It's book promotion event for the most recent anti-vaccine propaganda piece, Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children by Louise Kuo Habakus and Mary Holland. Naturally, the propaganda blog for all things anti-vaccine, Age of Autism, is furiously pimping away in a histrionic post entitled Is it Ethical to Kill Children to Save Children? Friday Night NYC Event Explains:
Should the government promote a…
oracknows | February 17, 2011I was originally going to write about Dr. Oz's show yesterday, entitled What Causes Autism? But then I started watching and realized that I just didn't have the constitutional fortitude to sit through the whole thing. Sorry to let you down, but there are some blogging tasks that I just can't handle, at least on some days, particularly Dr. Oz's faux outrage at one point. Last night was just one of those days. I was too tired and just not in the mood. Maybe I'll do it later. In the meantime, I'm going to do something that I don't do very often, namely use a new post to answer a comment. The…
oracknows | February 16, 2011$37 million.
If you were a medical school dean or a hospital administrator and had $37 million for a project, how woud you use it? What would you build? What would you renovate? What research projects would you fund? What infrastructure improvements would you make? Yes, $37 million is a lot of green. Back at my old job, if memory serves me correctly, a whole new addition to the cancer center that nearly tripled its square footage cost somewhere in the range of $35-40 million. True, that was nearly ten years ago; so building the same building might now cost more than $37 million. My point…
oracknows | February 16, 2011A couple of weeks ago, I had a bit of fun with a position statement by the International Medical Council on Vaccination (IMCV), which I called, in my own inimitable fashion, The clueless cite the ignorant to argue against vaccines. That's exactly what it was, too, some truly clueless anti-vaccinationists arguing against vaccines and bolstering their argument with a hilariously pathetic list of signatories, among which were noted anti-vaccine activists, chiropractors, homeopaths, and other dubious practitioners totaling only between 80-90. Among those signatories was a woman named Suzanne…
oracknows | February 15, 2011As most of you know, most of the basic and translational biomedical research in the U.S. is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Unfortunately, the NIH budget has been stagnant for the last five or six years. That's been bad enough, leading to a decline in funding success rates for applicants for research grants to a low level that we haven't seen in nearly 20 years. Worse, even though FY2011 started October 1, the federal government still doesn't have a real budget. It's operating on a continuing resolution. While this plays havoc with all government agencies, it's particularly…
oracknows | February 14, 2011Four days later, I still can't figure it out. I really can't.
Remember the other day when I said I was debating whether or not to respond to the latest excretion from one of the first hangers-on of the anti-vaccine movement I ever encountered after I started blogging. I'm referring, of course, to freelance journalist David Kirby, whose book Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Mystery, along with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s unbelievably brain dead Deadly Immunity, helped ignite the anti-vaccine fear mongering about mercury in vaccines back in 2005. My…
oracknows | February 13, 2011I've made no secret about the fact that I am not a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). I consider it a useless, redundant center within the National Institutes of Health because it does nothing that could't be done as well or better in the institutes and centers of the NIH that existed before woo-friendly Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) created NCCAM's precursor and then saw to it that it grew to a full center, with a budget in the $125 million a year range. Personally, if something has to be cut fromt the government in this time of fiscal austerity, I…
oracknows | February 12, 2011It's been pointed out to me that our old pal David Kirby, perhaps the cleverest antivaccine propagandist out there, is back at (where else?) The Huffington Post (a.k.a. HuffPo) asking why The Autism-Vaccine Debate: Why It Won't Go Away (short answer: because opportunists like Kirby have teamed with believers in pseudoscience to keep fanning the flames of this manufactroversy whenever they fade to embers). I've been debating whether it's worthwhile to produce a response to his disingenuously slimy arguments yet again, given that Kirby's being even more disingenuously slimy than usual. In the…
oracknows | February 11, 2011There's a quote attributed to philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer that is much beloved of cranks:
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
I hate this quote with a bloody passion. Actually, that's not quite true. Rather, I find it rather amusing in a pathetic sort of way, first because it's not true. Really, it's not. For instance, in science Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity wasn't exactly "violently opposed," and a lot of other scientific findings that challenge the existing paradigm have…
oracknows | February 10, 2011
Judge Orders Surgery For Teen Wrestler: MyFoxPHILLY.com
I have to be honest here. I don't know for sure what I think of the latest developments in the Mazeratti Mitchell case.
As you may recall from a couple of days ago, Mazeratti Mitchell is a 16 year old wrestler in Philadelphia who suffered a spinal cord injury while wrestling. Fortunately, given his subsequent course in which he has been recovering function, it was clearly not a complete transection of the spinal cord, but it was severe. His doctors recommended surgery to stabilize his spine and allow his injured spinal cord to heal.…
oracknows | February 10, 2011Let's face it. This week has just been one of those weeks, and it's not over yet. A little silly break is in order:
There, I fell better now.
Consider this a Thursday open thread. I haven't had an open thread in a while, and when things get busy enough it's a time-honored way of filling blog time...
oracknows | February 9, 2011It's been a crazy week that's reaching a crescendo today and tomorrow, so much so that, unlike yesterday, when I said I'd only be brief and ended up blathering on for close to 2,000 words (Mike Adams has that effect on me, particularly when he's at his most un-self-aware), today I really will be brief for once in my misbegotten logorrheic blogging career. I don't know why, but this warning by Jacob Bronowski about the danger of dogma and how absolute certainty can turn human beings into monsters popped up again, and I couldn't resist posting it*:
Science is uncertainty. That doesn't mean we…
oracknows | February 8, 2011Things are pretty hairy this week, what with a couple of grant deadlines fast approaching, not to mention a rather important site visit at my institution later this week. As a result, I had been intending to post a "rerun" today, but then I saw something that just cracked me up so much that I couldn't resist taking a few minutes to do an uncharacteristically brief (for me) post about it.
Earlier this week, there was an announcement of a blockbuster deal in which AOL is buying that wretched hive of scum and quackery (take that, Dean Toney!), The Huffington Post, for $315 million. Since then,…
oracknows | February 7, 2011If there's one thing that gets my blood boiling almost above all else when it comes to quackery, it's when parents subject children to it. The result has been copious blogging about cases, such as that of Daniel Hauser, Katie Wernecke, and Abraham Cherrix, all of whom refused chemotherapy for treatable cancers. I've also discussed Madeline Neumann, a 12-year-old girl whose parents, based on their religion, allowed her to die of diabetic ketoacidosis rather than save her life by allowing physicians to administer insulin and fluids. They thought prayer would save her. It didn't.
The following…
oracknows | February 7, 2011
Occasionally, there are topics that my readers want -- nay, demand -- that I cover. The topic of this post, it turns out, is one of them. It's a link to a TED Talk. I'm guessing that most of our readers have either viewed (or at least heard of) TED talks. Typically, they are 20-minute talks, with few or no slides, by various experts and thought leaders. Many of them are quite good, although as the TED phenomenon has grown I've noticed that, not unexpectedly, the quality of TED Talks has become much more uneven than it once was. Be that as it may, beginning shortly after it was posted,…
oracknows | February 6, 2011Lest I be left out of the fun, I can't help but point out that over the weekend the Amazing One himself, James Randi, issued a challenge to homeopathy manufacturers and retail pharmacies that sell homeopathy, in particular large national chains like Walgreens and CVS and large national chains that include pharmacies in their stores, such as Walmart and Target. This was done in conjunction with the 10:23 Challenge, which is designed to demonstrate that homeopathy is nonsense. All over the world, skeptics and supporters of science-based medicine gathered to engage in overdoses of homeopathic…
oracknows | February 5, 2011I never thought I'd be praising Bill Gates, being a Mac person and all and not being at all fond of Microsoft, but it's impossible for me not to in the wake of a recent interview Gates did with CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
As you probably know, since retiring from Microsoft, Bill Gates has dedicated himself to philanthropy in the form of the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. One of the greatest works of this foundation has been to initiate vaccination programs in the Third World. These activities are likely to save thousands, if not millions, of lives over…
oracknows | February 4, 2011Yesterday, in the course of applying a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence to a particularly brain dead exercise by the anti-vaccine movement, in which the International Medical Council on Vaccination (the most deceptively named anti-vaccine organization this side of the National Vaccine Information Center) gathered 80 signatures of "health care professionals" who warn about the danger of vaccines, I pointed out something I have noticed about not just anti-vaccine groups by by may different cranks groups. I'm referring to the "petition" or the statement attacking consensus science…
oracknows | February 3, 2011Now here's a new one:
Did the EPA director just imply that there's a link between contaminated water and autism? Is there something I'm missing here? Is this clip taking her out of context?
There is, of course, no credible scientific evidence linking autism to exposure to contaminated water.
oracknows | February 2, 2011Remember Medical Voices?
It's a group that I first discovered a year and a half ago that represented itself as a group of physicians and medical professionals who wanted to produce the "most comprehensive educational center on the Internet for physicians seeking the truth about vaccines." Of course, it didn't take me long to realize that MV was packed to the gills with the usual characters, antivaccine loons all, people such as Sherri Tenpenny, DO; Mayer Eisenstein, MD, JD, MPH; Harold Buttram, MD; and Leo Rebello, MD, ND, PhD. So copious were the utter nonsense, pseudoscience, misinformation…