oracknows

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David Gorski

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski. That Orac has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 30 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: oracknows@gmail.com

Posts by this author

July 11, 2017
If any of you are bloggers out there who like to write about studies, have you ever decided that you wanted to write about a study and discovered as you started writing that your university doesn't have access to the journal? Yeah, that happened to me last night. I had wanted to move on from…
July 10, 2017
I've been writing about antivaccine loons for a long time, and during that time I've seen them propose some crazy ideas. The other day, I came across one proposing what might well be the craziest, most irresponsible idea I've ever seen from an antivaccine activist. It comes from our old friend Kent…
July 9, 2017
I have to start this post with a mea culpa, perhaps even a mea maxima culpa. I've been going on and on, in essence gloating about how the antivaccine movement was once again betrayed by Donald Trump. After the betrayal that was the appointment of the ultimate pro-vaccine pharma shill as FDA…
July 7, 2017
As I sat down to lay down my daily (or at least week-daily) dose of Insolence last night, my thoughts kept coming back to vaccines. Sure, as I pointed out in yesterday's post, we seemed to have dodged a bullet in that President Trump appears on the verge of appointing someone who is actually…
July 5, 2017
As I mentioned yesterday, at NECSS I gave a talk, Whither the antivaccine movement in the Age of Trump? At the time, I only knew the identity of one of the most important public health figures appointed by President Donald Trump, and that's Scott Gottleib, the man appointed to be FDA Commissioner.…
July 5, 2017
As you can see, I don't have a new post ready for today. I attribute that to having been so busy at NECSS over the weekend that, by the time my wife and I got back on Monday late afternoon, we were pretty much beat. So I decided to do the American thing and take July 4 completely off, which means…
July 3, 2017
One of the most persistent narratives latched on to by advocates of "integrative medicine" is that the "mind" can somehow "heal" the body. Sometimes, the claim is that such interventions work through "powerful placebo" effects. Sometimes it involves the abuse of emerging science, such overblown…
June 28, 2017
Before I delve into the next topic, I can't help but congratulate John Oliver yet again for his excellent deconstruction of the antivaccine movement on Sunday night. As I noted on Tuesday, it clearly hit the mark, given how angry one antivax blogger got over it. As of yesterday, over at that…
June 27, 2017
I know that a lot of you like John Oliver and watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver , and I do too. In particular, I love how he devotes 20 minute segments of his show to intelligent long form comedy about all sorts of issues, including scientific and medical issues, including issues that I…
June 26, 2017
Orac gets fan mail. Yes, as hard as it is to believe, my blog sometimes ticks certain people off, and sometimes I even hear from them. For instance, last week a reader wrote me. The subject header read, "Why do you hate naturopathic physicians so much?" and the letter went something like this (OK,…
June 23, 2017
Long time readers (and I do mean really long time readers) know that I used to do a regular Friday feature called Your Friday Dose of Woo. In the feature, I used to look for the silliest, woo-iest bits of quackery and pseudoscience that I could find, like quantum homeopathy, SCIO, Quantum Xrroid…
June 21, 2017
Courtrooms are generally not a good place to decide issues of science. I've said this more times than I can remember. Admittedly, courts can at times do pretty well with issues of science. The Vaccine Court is a good example, as is the Autism Omnibus decision, which ruled that the test cases…
June 20, 2017
In pseudomedicine, fake diseases predominate. Basically, fake diseases are diseases that do not exist in conventional medicine as diagnostic entities because there does not exist sufficient sufficient evidence to support them as one or there exists compelling evidence that they are not. Naturopaths…
June 20, 2017
If there's one form of quackery that is among the most "respected," it has to be acupuncture. I've often speculated about why this might be, and the best that I can come up with is that doctors are a bit more open to acupuncture because it involves sticking actual needles into the body. It's very…
June 19, 2017
Well, I'm back. Hard as it is to believe, during my vacation I went a whole two weeks without writing a truly new post. That's something that hasn't happened in probably 12 years. Yes, as a result of the lack of original material for two weeks, my traffic appears to have taken a noticeable hit and…
June 14, 2017
Orac note: While Orac is on vacation (fear not, he'll be returning on Monday!), he's rerunning some of the "best of" the blog (if you can call it that). Actually, he's rerunning whatever strikes his fancy. This one struck my fancy because I used to use the term "altie" all the time, but haven't…
June 11, 2017
If there's one thing about the march of the pseudomedical entity known as "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), "integrative medicine," "complementary and integrative medicine" (CIM), "complementary and integrative health" (CIH), it's that over the last 25 years or so its progress towards…
June 11, 2017
So far, our vacation has been going quite well. We've hit two European cities, with today and tomorrow left where I am now and then on to the last one on Tuesday. Obviously, I haven't been paying nearly as much attention to this blog (or political news out of the US) as I normally do. It has been…
June 7, 2017
Orac Note: While Orac is on vacation, he's reprinting some of his "classics" (if you can call them that). He's also trying (but not always succeeding) to pick posts that have never been "rerun" before. (Orac has his favorites, and every few years when he's on vacation he can't resist rerunning them…
June 6, 2017
By the time you read this, I will have arrived at an undisclosed location somewhere in Europe. My 25th wedding anniversary is today, and to celebrate my wife and I planned a nearly two-week vacation flitting about Europe. I won't announce where exactly, given that I've irritated a couple of…
June 4, 2017
This is the sort of story that I really hate but feel obligated to discuss. I hate these stories because they usually portend the unnecessary death of a cancer patient, often a child with cancer whose parents refuse chemotherapy or who refuses chemotherapy and is unfortunate enough to have a parent…
June 2, 2017
I've discussed several times over the last several years my impression that the media have become in general less tolerant of antivaccine views. At least, the media seem less willing to indulge in "tell both sides" false equivalence. Back when I started blogging, I routinely used to bemoan how…
May 31, 2017
As hard as it is to believe, it was over seven years ago that I started my Annals of "I'm not antivaccine" series. The idea was (and continues to be) to point out how the claim that many antivaccine activists proclaiming themselves to be "not antivaccine" but rather "vaccine safety advocates" is,…
May 29, 2017
Surprisingly, I made it through an entire three day weekend without posting anything to the blog. Believe it or not, this is a good thing. It means that I actually worked on my grant that's due at the end of the week. Still, a blogger's gotta blog; so I can't just shut down until the end of the…
May 25, 2017
When I first started to take an interest in medical marijuana, I was struck by how much it reminded me of herbalism. Although herbalism is scientifically the most plausible of modalities commonly associated with "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), the use of herbal medicines still…
May 23, 2017
I hesitated over discussing this story because it only comes from one source and that source is not one that I normally trust, The Washington Free Beacon. It might be fake news. On the other hand, it is a story that is not implausible and appears to be reasonably well reported, complete with a…
May 22, 2017
As much as I like to deconstruct pseudoscientific claims, particularly about health, medicine, and health care, Sometimes it gets a bit draining. There's just so much pseudoscience, so much credulity, so much sheer idiocy out there that trying to refute them and encourage a more skeptical mindset…
May 21, 2017
Last week, I wrote about acupuncture, specifically how acupuncturists are unhappy that the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which provides guidelines for recommended treatments for diseases and conditions, does not recommend acupuncture for the treatment of knee…
May 19, 2017
Acupiuncture is a system of treatment rooted in the prescientific vitalism of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). It doesn't work. For anything. As Steve Novella and David Colquhoun put it, acupuncture is basically a theatrical placebo, which is why rigorous studies consistently fail to find a…
May 18, 2017
It looks as though the check has finally cleared. You might be wondering what I'm referring to. A little more than a week ago, I took note of how a truly awful survey masquerading as a "study" had risen from the dead once again as two publications in a notorious bottom-feeding predatory "open…