oracknows | September 30, 2010It just occurred to me that it's been a long, long time since I've done this, but how about an open thread to while away the time until the NIH R01 grant application is submitted, and that gloriously irritating and outrageously beautiful not-so-Respectful Insolence that you all crave can come roaring back with a vengeance? Come on, you know you want it. If we're lucky, maybe Jake Crosby or even Dr. Jay will come out and play.
Grant writing has that effect on me.
In the meantime, I think a video from a most excellent 1980s band sums up the situation when it comes to grant funding these days…
oracknows | September 30, 2010...take a gander at this post by Steve Novella about Gary Kompothecras and Charlie Crist and how they are endangering children's health in Florida by promoting the father-son team of antivaccine pseudoscientists Mark and David Geier, the very same issue I wrote about yesterday.
Fear not. The end is in sight. The logorrheic insolence you know and love (or hate) will soon return. In the meantime, I really need some coffee.
oracknows | September 29, 2010It's grant crunch time, which almost always means that a lot of stuff happens that I don't have time to write about and that the week after I submit it (i.e., next week) usually nothing interesting happens to write about and I'm left posting LOL Cats or something like that. Be that as it may, sometimes something happens that goads me to the point where I have to comment, although reality keeps me from my usual logorrhea. Who knows, maybe that's a good thing.
In any case, yesterday Brandon Thorp (who also works for the JREF) teamed up with Penn Bullock to write a disturbing report on just how…
oracknows | September 27, 2010I hate The Huffington Post. I really do.
Why, you ask, do I hate HuffPo so? I hate HuffPo so because of its history from the very beginning of its existence of promoting the vilest forms of anti-vaccine quackery and pseudoscience. It's because, over the last couple of years, not content with being the one-stop-shop for all things antivax on the Internet, right up there with Whale.to, Mercola.com, and NaturalNews.com, HuffPo branched out very early into quantum quackery, courtesy of Deepak Chopra. Just search for "Huffington Post" and "Deepak Chopra" on this blog and you'll discover how many…
oracknows | September 27, 2010Unfortunately, it's grant application crunch time again over the weekend. That means something's got to give, and what happened to be the thing to give was this blog. Fortunately, all is not lost, as a "good friend" of mine has commented on a recent New England Journal of Medicine study from Thursday about mammography. It may not be as "insolent" as the commentary that Orac lays down, but it's pretty darned good.
I'm fully expecting that the "alternative" medicine crowd will soon jump all over this study as "proof" that mammography is useless. It's nothing of the sort, and, more importantly,…
oracknows | September 26, 2010If there's one scary thing about working, it's the common kitchen area. On each floor of the research tower where my lab is located, there is a small area at the end of the hall with a sink, coffee maker, refrigerator, and some cabinets. These areas are all too rarely cleaned out. Last week, for some reason, an intrepid lab rat decided that the refrigerator on my lab's floor needed a cleaning. She found this:
So far, so what? Right? There's nothing unusual there. Someone forgot their Slimfast. Then she turned over the can (click image for larger version):
Expiration date: July 2004. I…
oracknows | September 24, 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. Besides getting into full R01 grant-writing swing, I went out to dinner last night with a visiting professor and didn't get home until too late for me to grind out one of those 2,000-4,000 word screeds you've come to know and a love. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in November 2006 that, shockingly, as far as I can tell I've never "rerun" before. Remember, if you've been reading less than four…
oracknows | September 23, 2010Naturopathy is a strange beast in the "alternative medicine" world. From what I've been able to tell, it's a wastebasket specialty with no overarching philosophical underpinnings, as traditional Chinese medicine underpins acupuncture or sympathetic magic underpins homeopathy. Basically, if it's woo, naturopaths will use it. Acupuncture, TCM, homeopathy, herbalism, nutritional woo, detox, it doesn't matter. To naturopaths, it's all good, as long as it isn't "conventional medicine." Wait. Not quite. After all naturopaths have been fighting for (and in some cases getting) prescribing authority…
oracknows | September 22, 2010Sometimes I can't figure anti-vaccine loons out. No, I'm not talking about the pure pseudoscience they lay down on a daily basis. I can sort of get how some of them might cling against all scientific evidence to the idea that somehow vaccines "damaged" their child, along with the blandishments of the army of quacks known as DAN! doctors promising them that, if you just use this diet, this new supplement, this new nostrum, this hyperbaric oxygen, you can have a normal child again. What I can't get is how individuals who, however misguided they are about science, even to the point of laying…
oracknows | September 22, 2010I've expounded on the principle of crank magnetism. Basically, crank magnetism is the tendency of cranks not to mind the crankery of other cranks, even if the two forms of crankery are mutually exclusive. But it's more than that. It's the tendency of a single crank to be attracted to several forms of crankery. We've seen it in creationists who are also attracted to "alternative medicine," in anti-vaccine loons who are also attracted to alternative medicine and various conspiracy theories, including "9/11 Truth." I've seen it in Holocaust deniers who are also attracted to both "alternative"…
oracknows | September 21, 2010Way, way back in the deepest darkest depths of history, before I entered the Knowledge Room and sold my soul to big pharma to become a pharma blogger (in other words, way back in 2005), my inauguration as a skeptical blogger taking on anti-vaccine misinformation, pseudoscience, and lies occurred in a big way when I referred to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s infamous article Deadly Immunity as flushing Salon.com's credibility down the toilet. That was when I discovered the mercury militia, that subset of the anti-vaccine movement that believes that mercury in the thimerosal preservative that used to…
oracknows | September 20, 2010This guy would appear to be screwed:
The rat running by the acupuncturist's door is a nice touch, too. And so appropriate.
oracknows | September 20, 2010A critical aspect of both evidence-based medicine (EBM) and science-based medicine (SBM) is the randomized clinical trial. Ideally, particularly for conditions with a large subjective component in symptomatology, the trial should be randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled. As Kimball Atwood pointed out just last week (me too), in EBM, scientific prior probability tends to be discounted while in SBM it is not, particularly for therapies that are wildly improbable strictly on the basis of basic science, but for both the randomized clinical trial remains, in essence, where the "rubber…
oracknows | September 19, 2010A friend of mine at work sent this video to me in great amusement.
I just hope he wasn't making a comment on my behavior when it comes to dealing with our biostatisticians. I have, of course, seen investigators approach biostatistians this late in the game. Not that I've ever flirted with this sort of behavior, of course.
oracknows | September 19, 2010If there's one area where I've been remiss, it's been in promoting new skeptics groups. Maybe it's the enormous Orac-ian ego. Maybe it's sheer laziness. Maybe it's becoming too engrossed in work and my two blog projects. I will try to rectify that in the future beginning by flogging a new skeptics group from my hometown. Well, not quite my hometown, but southeast Michigan nonetheless. I'm referring to the Michigan Skeptics Association, which now has a blog, has had a meetup, and has announced a new podcast dubbed the Drunken Skeptics Podcast, which will debut soon. It's to be hosted by Adam…
oracknows | September 17, 2010On the blogging front, I started out this week with a part facetious, part serious, part the highly detailed analysis of a new study of interest that you've come to know and love (or hate). The study was Price et al, and it was yet another nail in the coffin of the scientifically discredited notion that mercury in vaccines causes autism, a notion whose coffin already had so many nails in it that Price et al probably had a hard time finding even a tiny area of virgin wood into which to pound even a tiny nail of a study published in an impact factor one journal, much less the spike that their…
oracknows | September 16, 2010It's no secret that I'm a bit of a connoisseur of pareidolia.
The various shapes and contortions the human mind can impose on clouds, stains, pancakes, trees, toast, Lava lamps, toilet seats, and even medical imaging tests never ceases to amaze me. We are pattern-seeking creatures, and our brains will go to great lengths to impose familiar patterns onto objects. Sometimes, however, I have to call 'em as I see 'em, and this bit of pareidolia is just lame: Satan on a bathroom tile:
A family abandoned their bathroom fearing it had been possessed by the devil after an image of Satan appeared…
oracknows | September 15, 2010I'm a cancer surgeon.
I started out as a general surgeon, but my passion and scientific interest goaded me into specializing in cancer. Ultimately, I ended up subspecializing even more, ultimately becoming a breast cancer surgeon, but through it all cancer, not just breast cancer, has remained my clinical and scientific passion. So has science-based medicine. Developed as a response to the concept of "evidence-based medicine" (EBM), SBM postulates that clinical care should be based on the best science available, including the consideration of basic sciences and prior probability. EBM…
oracknows | September 14, 2010Yesterday, I had a bit of fun while taking on a serious topic, namely yet another study that failed to find a link between mercury in vaccines and autism. Fortunately, though, I wasn't the only one. Oh, no, not by any means.
Liz Ditz has done what she does best and provided a comprehensive linkfest of reaction to the study.
A few of my favorites from the list:
They DID a study! (Photon in the Darkness)
More evidence that mercury in vaccines doesn't cause autism (Science-Based Pharmacy)
The Long Awaited CDC Trial on Thimerosal and Autism (NeuroLogica Blog)
New thimerosal/autism paper - signal…