oracknows | November 2, 2010It's depressing to think that after today people like this may well be running the House:
This year, willful ignorance is a campaign platform.
oracknows | November 2, 2010One of the great things about having declared Vaccine Awareness Week is that it gives me a convenient excuse to revisit topics and blog posts that I had meant to address but that somehow didn't make the cut the first time around. This is the sort of thing that happens fairly frequently in blogging, where there is far too much woo and idiocy for one blogger to have even a hope of ever addressing it all.
And that's just the anti-vaccine movement.
In any case, if there's one thing about the anti-vaccine movement that I've noticed, it's that its members have a very warped view of both science and…
oracknows | November 1, 2010"Anti-vaccine."
I regularly throw that word around -- and, most of the time, with good reason. Many skeptics and defenders of SBM also throw that word around, again with good reason most of the time. There really is a shocking amount of anti-vaccine sentiment out there. But what does "anti-vaccine" really mean? What is "anti-vaccine"? Who is "anti-vaccine"? Why? What makes them "anti-vaccine"?
Believe it or not, for all the vociferousness with which I routinely go after anti-vaccine loons, I'm actually a relative newcomer to the task of taking on the anti-vaccine movement. Ten years ago, I…
oracknows | October 31, 2010As brief as it will be, this is my first post for my self-declared Vaccine Awareness Week, proposed to counter Barbara Loe Fisher's National Vaccine Information Center's and Joe Mercola's proposal that November 1-6 be designated "Vaccine Awareness Week" for the purpose of promoting all sorts of pseudoscience, quackery, and misinformation about "vaccine injury" and how dangerous vaccines supposedly are. As you may recall, I decided to try to coopt the concept for the purpose of countering the pseudoscience promoted by the anti-vaccine movement and urging medical, science, and skeptical…
oracknows | October 29, 2010I know I kvetch from time to time about the currently dismal funding situation for biomedical research and worry about whether I'll be able to keep my lab funded. However, every so often I'm reminded that cancer researchers by and large have it pretty good, at least compared to some academic disciplines:
oracknows | October 29, 2010If there's one thing that confounds advocates of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), it's the placebo effect. That's because, whenever most such remedies are studied using rigorous clinical trial design using properly constituted placebo controls, they almost always end up showing effects no greater than placebo effects. That's the main reason why they frequently suggest that, you know, all those rigorous, carefully constructed randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials aren't really the best way to investigate their woo after all. To them, it's much better to do "…
oracknows | October 28, 2010I was out late last night due to the call of duty. By the time I got home, it was too late, and I was too beat to provide you with the heapin' helpin' of Insolence, Respectful or not-so-Respectful, that I usually do. Nor did I have time to draft a substantive reply to Dr. Zilberberg, who is in the comments and apparently very unhappy that I criticized her for her tendency towards dualism and her repeating various things that sound similar to some of the favorite gambits of the anti-vaccine movement. I had basically had the temerity to suggest to Dr. Zilberberg that, if she doesn't want to be…
oracknows | October 27, 2010On Monday I took a blogger by the name of Dr. Marya Zilberberg to task for firing a series of profoundly anti-scientific broadsides against science-based medicine (SBM). Although I did not attack Dr. Zilberberg personally, I was quite harsh in my characterization of her attacks, because, well, they were quite bad, full of straw men, special pleading, and the claim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, all topped off with a particularly egregious mischaracterization of what SBM is. Steve Novella also piled on, which was appropriate because Dr. Zilberberg's attacks were mainly…
oracknows | October 26, 2010Forgive me if I'm feeling a little schadenfreude right now.
My current blog location has been criticized in the past for a variety of things, including, most recently, Pepsigate. One of the things that we've been criticized for is our on-again off-again use of Google Adsense, where the content of the page dictates which ads pop up. For skeptical blogs, this sometimes has some rather embarrassing consequences. For instance, when I write about vaccines, sometimes the ad server would serve up ads for chelation therapy or anti-vaccine quack nostrums. Ditto when I wrote about homeopathy, which…
oracknows | October 26, 2010Oh, goody. Just what we need.
Some of my readers sent this to me yesterday, and I, like them, was appalled. Apparently that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, has decided that it's starting a "real" health section (to be, apparently, distinguished from its old "Lifestyle" section, where previously most of its health quackery reporting and commentary resided (and presumably will still reside). Also, yes, I know I use the term "wretched hive of scum and quackery" whenever I mention HuffPo these days, but that's just because that's just what HuffPo is when it comes to…
oracknows | October 25, 2010Over my nearly six years of blogging, I've become known as a staunch advocate of science- and evidence-based medicine, both in the guise going under my long-used pseudonym "Orac" and under my real name. And so I am, which is why certain varieties of predictable attacks on science-based medicine (SBM) annoy me. Usually, they come down to appeals to other ways of knowing, rants against "arrogance," or tu quoque arguments trying to claim that SBM is as bad as whatever woo I happen to be criticizing at the time. Actually, strike that. The latter complaint often tries to argue that SBM is actually…
oracknows | October 24, 2010Wow. Just wow.
I realize that I haven't exactly been enamored of Richard Dawkins lately, at least not as much as I was, say, three or four years ago. Most of this came about gradually, although the final nail was driven into the proverbial coffin last fall, when Atheist Alliance International bestowed the Richard Dawkins Award to that quacktastic anti-vaccine and anti-science believer in woo and cancer quackery, Bill Maher, an atrocity that I likened to giving Jenny McCarthy an award for public health. Actually, the second to last nail was probably driven in back in May when Richard Dawkins…
oracknows | October 22, 2010Having gotten back from the Lorne Trottier Symposium, it occurred to me that my talk (not to mention much of my blogging about "alternative medicine" cancer cure testimonials) was nearly completely about breast cancer testimonials. This is, of course, not surprising, given that breast cancer is what I do for both patient care and research. However, there's so much more cancer quackery out there than just for breast cancer, and there are more cancer cure testimonials out there than just breast cancer testimonials. Indeed, I happened to come across one on (where else?) that wretched hive of…
oracknows | October 21, 2010Remember Hollie Quinn?
She's the woman who parlayed her "breast cancer cure testimonial" into a book deal, even though she underwent conventional surgical therapy of her cancer. When criticized for this, she came up with an incredibly lame defense of her book. Well, she's at it again. This time around, she's touting thermography:
As we describe in our book, Hollie uses thermography for ongoing monitoring of her health, and not just for her breasts but for her entire body. She hasn't had a mammogram in eight years, since her original diagnosis. Thermography isn't perfect, but it meets our…
oracknows | October 21, 2010My alma mater has let me down.
As many of you know, I went to the University of Michigan for both my undergraduate degree and for medical school. I still have a fairly strong attachment to the school, which is why I can still be disappointed when its faculty let me down. Unfortunately, it's happened, and this time U. of M. has disappointed by inadvertently providing ammunition for the anti-vaccine movement. I'm referring to a poll released by the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital (which is where I did my pediatrics rotations when I was in medical school). The poll results are being trumpeted…
oracknows | October 20, 2010I really have to give those guys at McGill University's Office for Science and Society credit. They're fast. In fact, they've already uploaded video for all the events at the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium. Here's the main page with the videos (the 2010 Trottier Symposium occurred on October 17, 18, and 19), and here are the individual links:
2010 Lorne Trottier Roundtable (moderated by Dr. Joe Schwarcz)
2010 Lorne Trottier Public Syposium
Investigating Pseudoscientific & Paranormal Claims with James Randi
Enjoy!
My "friend" also reports that a great time was had by all and he…
oracknows | October 20, 2010Yesterday was a travel day, which means I was too exhausted to grind out a piece of peerless logorrheic prose full of Insolence, Respectful, not-so-Respectful, or both. Fortunately, readers sent me something rather amusing that is also timely given some of the conversations we had at the Lorne Trottier Symposium Monday and Tuesday, where questions about why various forms of woo are not accepted by mainstream medicine, chemistry, science, etc. One answer that came up is that, if these things worked, there'd be a lot of really interesting things to study, applications of these things to real…
oracknows | October 19, 2010The Lorne Trottier Symposium is over, and it went quite well. Amazingly, even though I had to follow Michael Shermer's talk, people told me I didn't suck, which made me feel better. Oh, there was this issue of a guy who wanted to tout Royal Rife and his machine. He wouldn't have irritated me so much for doing that. What did irritate me was that he went on and on and on and wouldn't yield the microphone, to the point where I tried to interrupt him to ask him if he had a question and then ended up being perhaps too dismissive of his question. On the other hand, even Michael Shermer told him, "…
oracknows | October 18, 2010Posting will probably be very light the next couple of days because I'm at the Lorne Trottier Symposium. Not only have the organizers have packed my day with skeptical and science goodness, but I only have Internet access when I'm back at the hotel, which isn't very much. This is somewhat distressing to me because several readers have sent me a truly bad study implying that (with the press out and out saying that) because investigators couldn't detect signs of cancer in Egyptian mummies there must not have been cancer in pre-industrial times, the further implication being that all cancer is "…
oracknows | October 17, 2010Damn. Every so often another blogger will think of something that I really, really wished I'd thought of before. Times like this, and this handy-dandy alternative medicine flow chart.
I do think he missed one thing, though. Just because someone doesn't like having stuff shoved up their posterior doesn't mean they won't be into "detox." Colonic irrigation is part of many "detox" regimens. Of course, much woo overlaps; so you can't make any hard and fast rules. Consider this chart a guide instead.