oracknows | October 15, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. I happen to be sitting here in Palm Beach, Florida, but I'm not chilling at the beach or pool. Rather, I'm attending "leadership training." Yes, be very, very afraid! In any case, I never saw the point of having these sorts of training seminars at beautiful oceanfront locations if they're going to pack the entire day with, you know, actual training! Worse (for purposes of blogging), I really have to fine tune my…
oracknows | October 15, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. I happen to be sitting here in Palm Beach, Florida, but I'm not chilling at the beach or pool. Rather, I'm attending "leadership training." Yes, be very, very afraid! In any case, I never saw the point of having these sorts of training seminars at beautiful oceanfront locations if they're going to pack the entire day with, you know, actual training! Worse (for purposes of blogging), I really have to fine tune my…
oracknows | October 14, 2010A couple of weeks ago, as Breast Cancer Awareness Week was approaching, I was highly disturbed to see everybody's favorite wretched hive of scum and quackery (The Huffington Post, in case you didn't know) promoting a dubious breast cancer testimonial for quackery. This testimonial, contained in a book entitled You Did What? Saying "No" to Conventional Cancer Treatment and promoted in a HuffPo post by an acupuncturist named One Woman's Story: Saying No to Conventional Cancer Treatment, on the surface sounded as though a woman named Hollie Quinn had eschewed all conventional therapy after being…
oracknows | October 14, 2010...is seeing the Australian campaign group Australian Vaccination Network have its charitable license removed by the Australian government.
Read the official revocation of Meryl Dorey's charitable status and smile.
oracknows | October 13, 2010October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a fact that is hard to escape. It's one of those things that I have mixed feelings about, particularly now that I've had a close relative, namely my mother-in-law, die of breast cancer less than two years ago. On the one hand, the attention that's brought to the cause of breast cancer is helpful for spurring research and donations to support research, as well as promoting screening programs. On the other hand, I do now have a bit of understanding about "pink washing," and some of the whole "pink thing" at times makes me uneasy. Be that as it may, one…
oracknows | October 12, 2010Although American skeptics might not be familiar with her, Australian skeptics are, sadly, all too well-acquainted with Meryl Dorey. Dorey, in case you're not familiar with her, is the head of the Australian anti-vaccine group with the wonderfully Orwellian name Australian Vaccination Network, which is basically the Australian equivalent of American anti-vaccine groups like National Vaccine Information Center or Generation Rescue or the British anti-vaccine group JABS when it comes to spreading anti-vaccine propaganda far and wide down under. The only difference is that Dorey may be even…
oracknows | October 12, 2010I sometimes think I ought to send a thank you letter to Dr. Mark Hyman.
True, I don't owe him quite as much as I owe, for example, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com, anyone on the blogging crew of the anti-vaccine crank propaganda blog Age of Autism, Dr. Jay Gordon, or several other pseudoscientists, quacks, or other assorted cranks who have provided me with blogging material over the last five years. However, whether he's mangling autism science, postulating dubious "personalized medicine" for Alzheimer's disease, championing that form of quackery known as "functional medicine," trying to…
oracknows | October 11, 2010About a week and a half ago, Dr. Bob Sears, he of the "alternative vaccine schedule," appeared on Fox & Friends. Somehow, someway, even though I meant to deconstruct it I never got around to it. Believe it or not, during the interview Dr. Sears stooped to the anti-vaccine idiocy that calls vaccines "unnatural" because they are "injected directly into the bloodstream" (they're not, by the way), and I couldn't let that pass.
But I did.
Fortunately, ScienceMom at Just the Vax has taken it on so that I don't have to anymore.
oracknows | October 11, 2010
Well, this looks interesting. It's the 2010 Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium at McGill University in Montreal. This year, the theme is Confronting Pseudoscience: A Call to Action. A certain "friend of the blog" will be speaking with Ben Goldacre and Michael Shermer on Monday, October 18 from 5 to 7 PM on the Threat of Pseudoscience. He'll also be on Dr. Joe's radio show on CJAD 800. On Tuesday, October 19, the ever-amazing Randi will speak on investigating paranormal claims.
If you happen to be in the Montreal area or can get there on October 18 and/or 19, come on over to McGill. It…
oracknows | October 11, 2010Words fail me. How anyone can be so callous beggars imagination. Yeah, sure, Jennifer Petkov ultimately apologized, but only after news of her vileness was spread far and wide around the world. Worse, it was one of those "not-pologies" where Petkov said she was sorry "if anyone was hurt" not that she was sorry for having behaved despicably and thereby having caused that hurt, all topped off with an utterly lame and completely unbelievable lie that she "never really meant any ill wishes towards" Kathleen Edward or her family. And, yes, wearing the glasses was a nice obviously cynical touch…
oracknows | October 10, 2010Over the weekend, I saw a rather fascinating post by Sullivan entitled A Sense of Civil Discourse. The reason I found it so fascinating is because what was quoted in it utterly destroyed my irony meter yet again, leaving it nothing but a molten, gooey mess still bubbling and hissing in my office. Apparently last week, Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted, authors of the distillation of all the craziness that is the blog Age of Autism into book form under the same title, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, did a radio interview on the Leonard Lopate Show. During the…
oracknows | October 10, 2010Lazy Sunday, too lazy for blogging, particularly after last week. So instead, here's some tunage from a group I recently discovered. I'll be back tomorrow.
Yeah, that's sort of how I feel after a couple of trips in a row.
oracknows | October 8, 2010Around about this time last year, the nation, nay, the world, was in the throes of a frenzy about the H1N1 influenza pandemic. It was also fertile ground for skeptical blogging for two reasons. First, it was a major health-related story. Second, the mass vaccination campaigns for H1N1 that governments thew together hurriedly was a magnet for quacks, cranks, and loons of the anti-vaccine variety. Truly, the craziness came fast and furious, with each new day bringing a new atrocity against science and reason. Indeed, even one of my favorite magazines, The Atlantic, wasn't immune, as…
oracknows | October 7, 2010Last week blew by me in a blur. Because I was in full grant writing frenzy to get an R01 in the can by Friday, pretty much anything that wasn't totally urgent got shoved aside, at least after Wednesday. Of course, it was last Wednesday that yet another mammography study was being touted as a "landmark" study. I had just enough time to look it over briefly and decide that I really should blog about it, particularly given that it came hot on the heels of a Norwegian study less than a week before that found the benefits of mammography to be less than previously believed and even more…
oracknows | October 6, 2010As I mentioned earlier this morning, I went to get my annual flu vaccine. It's the least I can do to protect myself and to protect the immunosuppressed patients around me in a major cancer center. I was looking forward to cheekily asking the nurse administering the vaccine to make sure mine had thimerosal, but when I got to the part of the clinic where the flu vaccines were being administered I was in for a nasty surprise.
The first indication came when I had to fill out a form similar to last year's form asking me if I had ever had a reaction to egg products or the seasonal influenza vaccine…
oracknows | October 6, 2010It's about time.
My cancer center is finally offering the flu vaccine for its employees, and I'm off to go and get it. I'll be sure to ask for extra thimerosal. Even though Jock Doubleday's challenge seems to have disappeared, I'll still do it in his honor.
This year, I'm particularly proud of my cancer center in that its leadership has made a stand by partnering with other health care institutions in the city and requiring the flu vaccine for employees who directly interact with patients. That means doctors, nurses, support staff, receptionists, pretty much everyone other than the lab rats…
oracknows | October 5, 2010One of the favorite fallacious arguments favored by pseudoscientists and denialists of science is the ever infamous "science was wrong before" gambit, wherein it is argued that, because science is not perfect or because scientists are not perfect, then science is not to be trusted. We've seen it many times before. Indeed, we saw it just yesterday, when promoters of quackery and anti-vaccine cranks leapt all over the revelation that American scientists had intentionally infected Guatemalan prisoners with syphilis without their consent as part of an experiment in the 1940s. They didn't attack…
oracknows | October 4, 2010If there's one thing that burns me about so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) clinical trials, it's how unethical many of them are. This is particularly true for trials that test modalities that, on the basic science grounds alone, can be dismissed as so highly implausible and with such a low prior probability of success that it is unethical to subject patients to risk with close to zero potential for benefit. Perhaps the most egregious example of such a clinical trial is the Gonzalez protocol in pancreatic cancer, a cornucopia of woo and quackery including up to 150…
oracknows | October 3, 2010As I recover from the joy of deadlines, I decided to take the weekend off from blogging (new material, at least). In the meantime, here's some good Sunday reading for you, the Cancer Research Blog Carnival.
The Insolence shall return tomorrow. And there are, unfortunately, many deserving targets, not all of them woo.
oracknows | October 1, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times, thanks to R01 deadlines. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in September 2007 that, shockingly, as far as I can tell I've never "rerun" before. Remember, if you've been reading less than three years it's probably new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than three years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged.
As I usually do on Thursday nights, I was perusing my legendary Folder…