March 25, 2012
As sometimes happens, last week I let myself get tied up writing multiple posts about a single topic, namely the promotion of an antivaccine movie by a school board president in California, apparently as part of an attempt to influence California legislators who are considering a law that will make…
March 23, 2012
I've discussed the concept of "misinformed consent" multiple times before. Quacks in general, particularly the "health freedom" movement proclaim their dedication to "informed consent." "All we're asking for," they will say, "is informed consent." The antivaccine movement in particular demands "…
March 22, 2012
I'll give the Canary Party credit for one thing, if credit you can consider it. It's persistent in its promotion of antivaccine pseudoscience.
Somehow, someone at Current TV decided that it would be a good idea to show an utterly unbalanced, utterly cranky, utterly propagandistic "documentary" (The…
March 21, 2012
San Ramon, we have a problem.
The other day, I laid some not-so-Respectful Insolence on a clueless school board president in San Ramon Valley, California, named Greg Marvel. What merited a heapin' helpin' of what Orac does so well was Marvel's use of school board stationery to endorse a stinking,…
March 20, 2012
Sometimes you find good skepticism in strange places. One example of this has been Cracked.com. Normally, Cracked.com is a humor site based on the magazine that I used to read sometimes back in 1970s. Unfortunately, the magazine folded several years ago, but the website lives on. For example,…
March 19, 2012
A science-based blogger's work is never done, apparently.
I'll show you what I mean in a minute. But first, I just have to make a simple observation. Pseudoscience, be it quackery, evolution denial, denial of anthropogenic global warming, antivaccine nonsense, or other forms of pseudoscience,…
March 18, 2012
About a month ago, I wrote about a study that looked at metrics of patient satisfaction and compared them to hard outcomes often used to evaluate quality of care, including frequency of emergency room usage, frequency of hospitalization, and overall mortality. Even though these days there appears…
March 16, 2012
The Autism File bills itself as a magazine dealing with all aspects of autism. In reality, it's basically a crank magazine dedicated to autism biomedical quackery plus a generous helping of antivaccine fear mongering. In fact, this passage should tell you all you need to know about the publication…
March 15, 2012
If there's one quack who both amuses and appalls me at the same time, it's Robert O. Young. You remember Robert O. Young, don't you? He's the guy who thinks that all disease is caused by excess acid. I've written about him quite a few times over the last several years. For instance, he amused me…
March 13, 2012
There are quite a few reasons why I blog. After all, to crank out between 500 and 3,000 words a day, with an average of somewhere around 1,500 by my reckoning) takes quite a commitment. One of the main reasons that I do this is to combat the irrationality that permeates the world, and, since I know…
March 12, 2012
"Patient-centered care."
It's the new buzzword in patient care. Personally, I find the term mor ethan a little Orwellian in that it can mean so many things. Basically, it's a lot like Humpty Dumpty when he says to Alice, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor…
March 12, 2012
I don't know what it is about the beginning of a year. I don't know if it's confirmation bias or real, but it sure seems that something big happens early every year in the antivaccine world. Consider. As I pointed out back in February 2009, in rapid succession Brian Deer reported that Andrew…
March 11, 2012
Having a reasonably popular blog is a cool thing because at times I can do things like what I'm about to do. I'd like to start the week off with a little bit of crowdsourcing. Earlier this week, a reader wrote to me at my not-so-super-secret other blog with a request that concluded:
In short, I was…
March 9, 2012
Thanks to the partying and backslapping going on in the antivaccine movement over the reversal of the decision of the British General Medical Council to strike Professor John Walker-Smith off of the medical record, after a brief absence vaccines are back on the agenda of this blog. Antivaccine…
March 7, 2012
I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine crankosphere.
Actually, maybe "disturbance" is the wrong word. Unabashed whooping it up is closer to correct. High-fiving is perhaps a better term. Or maybe partying like it's 2005. The question, of course, is what is the inciting event was that sparked such…
March 6, 2012
If there's one thing that practitioners of dubious cancer therapies rely upon, it's testimonials. If there's one such practitioner who really, really relies on testimonials, it's Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, founder of the Burzynski Clinic. Dr. Burzynski is known for what he refers to as "…
March 5, 2012
Remember Gayle DeLong?
Last summer, DeLong published a paper in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, entitled A Positive Association found between Autism Prevalence and Childhood Vaccination uptake across the U.S. Population. As I pointed out at the time, it showed nothing of the…
March 4, 2012
A fascination with quackery was one of the things that inspired me to start this blog. Some of it was disbelief that anyone could take some of the modalities that I write about seriously. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples of this reaction was when I first learned that there were people who…
March 2, 2012
I was originally going to write about an amazing article that appeared in the NEJM today, but then, as happens all too often, something more compelling caught my eye. Unfortunately, it's compelling in exactly the wrong way. It's infuriating and saddening, all at the same time. It's also yet another…
March 1, 2012
I've always been reluctant to attribute antiscientific attitudes to one political persuasion or another--and justly so, or so I thought. While it's true that antiscience on the right is definitely more prominent these days, with the Republican candidates conducting virtual seminars on how to deny…
February 28, 2012
If there's one thing I've learned over the last seven years, it's that there are a handful of people in the "natural health" movement (a.k.a., quackery movement) who can reliably counted upon to bring home the crazy in spades. There is, of course the granddaddy of all conspiracy sites, Whale.to,…
February 28, 2012
Yesterday was a rough day for me; so I'll be uncharacteristically brief today.
As I've pointed out time and time again, these days, advocates of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) don't like it so much anymore when their preferred quackery is referred to as "CAM." Now the preferred term…
February 26, 2012
Every so often, something happens that rekindles the need in me to discuss what, exactly, it means to be "antivaccine." As many of my readers know, if there's one thing about antivaccinationists, it's that they assiduously avoid ever admitting that they are antivaccinationists. In order to avoid…
February 24, 2012
Back in September, I merrily applied a little not-so-Respectful Insolence to the service of deconstructing the overwhelmingly silly fear mongering by a group known as SANE Vax over the alleged discovery of HPV DNA in the HPV vaccine. SANE Vax, as you may recall, is a group founded by a woman named…
February 23, 2012
Any regular reader of this blog knows who Andrew Wakefield is. He's the British gastroenterologist who almost singlehandedly ignited a panic about the MMR vaccine (well, not quite single-handedly; the sensationalistic British press helped a lot) with his shoddy, fraudulent research linking the MMR…
February 23, 2012
There's something about the prefix "anti" that provokes all too many people, even some who consider themselves "skeptics," to clutch at their pearls and feel faint. Antivaccine? Oh, no, you can't say that! They're not "antivaccine"? Who could be so nutty as to be "antivaccine"? Even members of the…
February 21, 2012
If there's one thing I've learned during the last seven years about the antivaccine crowd invested in the idea that vaccines cause autism, it's that it reacts with extreme hostility to any sort of studies that cast doubt upon their pet idea that vaccines cause autism. That's somewhat understandable…
February 20, 2012
Like many geeks, I enjoy The Big Bang Theory. I know, I know, you're shocked to hear that, but it's true. I've seen nearly every episode since the first season. Over the last couple of seasons, the male-centric show has been considerably improved by its move towards more of an ensemble cast that…
February 19, 2012
If there's one thing that purveyors of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)--or, the preferred term these days, "integrative medicine" (IM)--and hospital administrators seem to agree on, it's that "patient satisfaction" (whatever that means) is very, very important. Hospital…
February 16, 2012
Since 2012 was rung in a month and a half ago, I've been writing a lot more about placebo medicine than I have in a while. Specifically, I've written a lot more about placebo effects than usual. This proliferation of posts on the topic was sparked by how Harvard University's very own not-a-PhD…
