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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

June 7, 2012
I've lost track of how many times over the last 7 years I've mentioned that naturopathy is not science-based. The evidence is overwhelming. All you have to do is to took at the wide variety of quackery that fits comfortably into naturopathic practice to realize that most of naturopathy is quackery…
June 5, 2012
Remember Vox Day? Newer converts to the glory that is Orac (or at least to the ego that is Orac) might not know who Vox is because it's been a while since I've discussed his antiscience attitudes. By and large, this is probably a good thing, given that Vox denies evolution, has been antivaccine…
June 5, 2012
A very sad bit of news has come to my attention, courtesy of a reader. Billie Bainbridge has died of her brainstem cancer. Regular readers might remember this unfortunate young girl, who was diagnosed with a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma of the brainstem last year. The tumor was inoperable, and…
June 4, 2012
Let me start right here by repeating yet again my oft-repeated assessment of reiki. Reiki is clearly nothing more than faith healing that substitutes Eastern mysticism for Christianity. Think of it this way. In faith healing, the faith healer claims to channel the healing power of God into the…
June 3, 2012
Homeopaths are funny. Really, that's the best description of them that I can think of right now. And I don't mean "funny ha-ha," either. An example of this popped up over the weekend in an attack on Dr. Joe Schwarcz of McGill University's Office for Science and Society. "Dr. Joe," as he likes to be…
June 2, 2012
The day is here. Time to throw the switch. What do I mean? I've been mentioning that I wanted to turn on the option that states, "Comment author must have a previously approved comment." What that means is that any new commenter's first comment will automatically go to moderation. I'll approve it (…
May 31, 2012
I've pointed out before that pover the last couple of years I've become a bit of a fan of old time radio, having discovered Radio Classics on Sirius XM Radio. I don’t remember how I discovered it, but I rapidly became hooked on shows like Suspense, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, The Whistler,…
May 30, 2012
Remember Dr. Jay? Regular readers know about whom I speak. I'm talking about Dr. Jay Gordon, pediatrician to the stars' children. Dr. Jay has been a fixture on this blog on and off for seven years, first having popped in as a commenter way back on Respectful Insolence, Mark 1, when I first noted…
May 29, 2012
When I saw the latest screed from that very living embodiment of crank magnetism, Mike Adams, I chuckled. I sent it around to some fellow skeptics, including, for instance, the crew at The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, as well as acquaintances and friends of mine because I couldn't believe it.…
May 28, 2012
I always thought that the University of Toronto was a great school, but lately I've been starting to have my doubts. My doubts began three years ago, when I noticed that Autism One Canada, which is basically the Canadian version of the yearly antivaccine biomedical quackfest held every Memorial Day…
May 27, 2012
I was thinking of taking Memorial Day off. There are several reasons. First, it's a holiday. Second, the blog still isn't functioning quite up to snuff after the transition to WordPress. In particular, we still have a major spam infestation that is unlikely to improve before Tuesday. It also doesn'…
May 27, 2012
My American readers don't need this reminder, but, because I'm continually humbled at how many international readers I have, I thought I'd just mention it anyway. We here in the States are in the middle of a three day holiday weekend for Memorial Day on Monday. As a result, I'm taking it (mostly)…
May 25, 2012
It's that time of year again. What am I talking about? Regular readers know. They know that sometime around the Memorial Day weekend every year, usually beginning a couple of days before the extended weekend and into the weekend itself, there lands in the Chicago area a quackfest of such…
May 24, 2012
Well, screwed up transition to WordPress or not, I think it's time to get back to the business of doing what Orac does best: Laying down the Insolence, Respectful and Not-So-Respectful. While the remaining bugs are being ironed out, I'll work on trying to get the blog's appearance back to the way I…
May 23, 2012
Why, oh, why is it that it is seemingly impossible for any sort of significant change to the ScienceBlogs collective to occur without major problems? It happened a a few years ago when we underwent the first major template upgrade. Given that experience, it was with great trepidation that I faced…
May 21, 2012
...the long-awaited migration to WordPress, promised ever since NatGeo took over: Notice: ScienceBlogs.com will be migrating to a new publishing platform starting on the evening of Monday, May 21 at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time. Please do not add any comments or posts between then and Tuesday…
May 20, 2012
Acupuncture has been a frequent topic on this blog because, of all the "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) modalities out there, it's arguably the one that most people accept as potentially having some validity. The rationale behind acupuncture is, as we have explained many times before…
May 18, 2012
I'm sometimes asked why I do this. Why, people ask me, do I spend so much time generating post after post after post day after day after day? Obviously, one reason is that it interests me. Another reason is the passion that drives me to support science and science-based medicine and to detest the…
May 17, 2012
About a week ago, I took note of what appears to be a new offshoot of the antivaccine movement known as the Thinking Moms' Revolution (TMR). At the time, I pointed out the toxic combination of hubris mixed with ignorance that resulted in a risible "declaration of independence" from "medical tyranny…
May 16, 2012
I'm sometimes criticized for referring to various people who are "anti-science" as, well, "anti-science." People, for whatever reason, have a hard time believing that anyone is anti-science; so when I point out how much, for example, antivaccinationists, alternative medicine believers, or…
May 14, 2012
I acquiesce. I know that I'm not going to have a lot of control over my selection of blogging material for a given day when I see more than one or two requests for an analysis of an article. So it was, when links like these were showing up in my e-mail: Acupuncture May Help Ease Symptoms of COPD…
May 13, 2012
Last week, I pointed out that, when referring to a therapy and considering whether it should be tested in clinical trials, plausibility does not mean knowing the mechanism. Today, I intend to elaborate a bit on that. As my jumping-off point, I couldn't ask for anything better (if you can call it…
May 11, 2012
It's been a while since I've done a bit of Your Friday Dose of Woo, and I actually kind of miss it. It's not that there hasn't been anything that hasn't been worthy of this "honor" for a while. On the other hand, there hasn't been anything in a while that combines just the right proportions of pure…
May 10, 2012
One of my newer blogging interests is the "alternative" cancer doctor named Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Although I had heard of him years ago, mainly in the context of his desperate patients tapping into the generosity of kind-hearted strangers to pay for his "antineoplaston" therapy, I hadn't really…
May 8, 2012
I tend to get lost in complexity from time to time. I know, big surprise to my regular readers, but I suppose it's a good thing that at least I know that this is a weakness of mine. Indeed, it must be part and parcel of my seeming tendency to produce epic posts of ridiculous length that sometimes…
May 7, 2012
It's no secret that over the years I've been very critical of a law passed nearly 20 years ago, commonly referred to as the DSHEA of 1994. The abbreviation DSHEA stands for about as Orwellian a name for a law as I can imagine: the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Of course, as we've…
May 6, 2012
One of the most inaptly named groups I've ever seen is called Thinking Moms' Revolution (henceforth abbreviated as TMR). Given the reality of what TMR really is, the word "thinking" applied to TMR is, as they say, so wrong it's not even wrong. As for a "revolution," what TMR really represents is…
May 4, 2012
Denialism. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The story might be apocryphal, and it might not even be true, but it's often used as a metaphor. I'm referring to the "boiling frog" story. Basically, the idea is supposedly based on an observation that a frog,…
May 2, 2012
Over the years that this blog has been in existence, beginning very early on, there has been one overarching theme. That theme is that the best medicine is science-based medicine. Sure, we could quibble about how that was originally defined, and I used to be more of a booster of evidence-based…
May 2, 2012
Oh, goody. Remember last week, when I took note of how organized quackery's best friend in Congress, not to mention a shining example of crank magnetism, Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, was taking the opportunity of his having announced that he would not be running for reelection this year to…