August 28, 2011
Whenever I refer to an anti-vaccine activist as an "anti-vaxer" or an "anti-vaccinationist," I can always count on outraged and self-righteous denunciations from the the person who is being labeled as "anti-vaccine." "Oh, no," she'll say, "I'm not 'anti-vaccine.' I'm pro-safe vaccine." or "I'm a…
August 26, 2011
Here we go again.
Having been in the blogging biz for nearly seven years and developed a special interest in the anti-vaccine movement, I think I've been at this long enough to make some observations with at least a little authority. One thing that I've noticed is a very consistent pattern in which…
August 25, 2011
A couple of days ago, I couldn't resist discussing a recent article in the New York Times about recent discoveries in cancer research. I considered the article to be a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. While the article did a pretty good job of describing recent discoveries about how…
August 24, 2011
One of the things that distinguishes evidence-based medicine (EBM) and science-based medicine (SBM) is how the latter takes into account prior probability that a therapy is likely to work when considering clinical trials. My favorite example to demonstrate this difference, because it's so stark and…
August 23, 2011
About a week ago, there appeared a story in the New York Times about recent discoveries in cancer research written by George Johnson and entitled Cancer's Secrets Come Into Sharper Focus. Overall, it was a better-than-average article for the lay press about recent discoveries in cancer research…
August 22, 2011
Chiropractic has origins in mysticism and vitalistic thinking. Given its popularity and seeming mainstream acceptance, it's easy to forget that these days. Fortunately, Daryl Cunningham reminds us of the history of chiropractic, including its philosophical underpinnings and potential complications:
August 21, 2011
Sadly, a crank has silenced another skeptic.
Many of you may know EpiRen, which is the Twitter and blog handle (and sometimes commenting handle here) of René Najera. René is an epidemiologist employed by the state public health department of health of an East Coast state and has been a force for…
August 21, 2011
I realize that this has nothing to do with science, skepticism, or medicine. However, it's Sunday, and I found it amusing. Nothing like a little fluff before diving back into the usual topics next week. It's also cool that David Mitchell has his own YouTube series of videos.
Given that Christmas…
August 18, 2011
I don't know if I should thank Peter Lipson or condemn him.
What am I talking about? Yesterday, Peter sent me a brain-meltingly bad study in so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" that shows me just how bad a study can be and be accepted into what I used to consider a reasonably good…
August 18, 2011
It's always frightening when lawyers delve into the realm of medicine. It's even worse when pre-law students and political science majors do the same.
Such was the thought running through my mind when I came across the most recent issue of the Yale Journal of Medicine & Law. The result is what…
August 17, 2011
Many have been the times that I've pointed out that many forms of "alternative" medicine are in reality based far more on mystical, religious, or "spiritual" beliefs than on any science. Indeed, one amusing event that provided me the opening to launch into one of my characteristic (and fun) Orac-…
August 17, 2011
It never ceases to amaze me just how ignorant of very basic principles of science anti-vaccine activists often are. I mean, seriously. Every time they try to post something, whether they know it or not, they end up making themselves look so very, very stupid--or at least ignorant. The Dunning-…
August 16, 2011
One thing that's bothered me about religion even before I became the lapsed Catholic heathen that I am, is how God always gets the credit for good things but never the bad. A perfect example is related to the collapse of the stage in a storm at the Indiana State Fair that killed five people and…
August 16, 2011
One of these days I'm going to end up getting myself in trouble.
The reason, as I've only half-joked before, is that, even though I'm not even 50 yet, I'm already feeling like a dinosaur when it comes to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's called more frequently now, "…
August 14, 2011
NOTE: I was on a lovely vacation for three days in Chicago over the weekend, where I visited old haunts. (Bathroom attendants? At one of my favorite pub hangouts when I lived in Lincoln Park, John Barleycorn? Handing out crappy brown paper towels? Plastering the walls there with endless rows of…
August 12, 2011
A week ago, I took someone who has normally been a hero of mine, Brian Deer, to task for what I considered to be a seriously cheap shot at scientists based on no hard data, at least no hard data that he bothered to present. To make a long, Orac-ian magnum opus short, Deer advocated increased…
August 11, 2011
The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace, except that it's not just quackademic medicine. Now, it goes way, way beyond that to encompass not just academic medical centers but community hospitals, hospitals of all sizes, large private hospitals, and health care institutions of all…
August 10, 2011
Well, well, well, well...
I always wondered about this.
As I pointed out the other day, former NIH director Bernadine Healy died of a recurrent brain tumor. As regular readers know, over the last three or four years, she had become a convert to the vaccine/autism cause, as evidenced by her having…
August 10, 2011
Here we go again.
Starting sometime in 2007, back when the idea that mercury in vaccines was the cause of the "autism epidemic" of the late 1990s and into the new century, I started referring to the "mercury/autism" hypothesis as being dead, dead, dead, as in pining for the fjords dead. Then,…
August 9, 2011
It came as a shock to me to find out yesterday that former director of the American Red Cross and former director of the NIH Bernadine Healy died. Chalk it up to my simply being ignorant of the fact, but I didn't know, or had forgotten, that she had brain cancer. Interestingly, she had had this…
August 8, 2011
Over the years that I've been following the anti-vaccine movement, I've become familiar with typical narratives that reporters use when reporting on the vaccine fears stirred up by anti-vaccine activists. One narrative is the "brave maverick doctor" narrative, in which an iconoclastic quack (such…
August 6, 2011
Here's blast from the past.
Interestingly, this doesn't exaggerate all that much...
August 5, 2011
I admire Brian Deer. I really do. He's put up with incredible amounts of abuse and gone to amazing lengths to unmask the vaccine quack Andrew Wakefield, the man whose fraudulent case series published in The Lancet thirteen years ago launched a thousand quack autism remedies and, worst of all,…
August 4, 2011
Now this is some seriously funny stuff.
Anyone who's been reading this blog a while knows my opinion of Deepak Chopra. Basically, he's the quackiest of the quantum quacks, the godfather of quantum woo, the one woo-meister to rule them all. He did it first and did it "best" (if you can call it that…
August 3, 2011
...the results aren't pretty.
If there's one thing about anti-vaccine loons that I've come to learn over the last decade or so, it's that when they think they're being clever, they're really not. Exhibit A for this case follows:
Yes, courtesy of a particularly brain dead anti-vaccine website (and…
August 2, 2011
File this under "Well, duh!"
In thinking about "alternative" medicine, occasionally I contemplate the deepest, most profound questions having to do with health and healing, the difference between science-based medicine and evidence-based medicine, and how to maximize the therapeutic effect of…
August 2, 2011
One of the very first themes I started hammering on in this blog, dating back to its very inception, is the analysis of alternative medicine cancer testimonials. One reason was (and is) that I take care of cancer patients and do research into developing new treatments for a living. Another reason…
July 31, 2011
As hard as it is to believe, I've been blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense and autism quackery since early 2005. Before that, I had been a regular on the misc.health.alternative newsgroup, where I had also encountered anti-vaccine pseudoscience, but the topic had not been a top priority for me. In…
July 29, 2011
It's been around four years now since I first wrote a post about what I now like to call the "toxins gambit" favored by anti-vaccine loons. This particular gambit consists of finding scary-sounding chemicals in vaccines, such as formaldehyde, and then trying to stoke fear of vaccines based on their…
July 28, 2011
Once upon a time, there was quackery. It was the term used to refer to medical practices that were not supported by evidence and were ineffective and potentially harmful. Physicians understood that modalities such as homeopathy, reflexology, and various "energy healing" (i.e., faith healing)…