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Conservative Thought = Anti-Atheism Thought

At least, that is the conclusion you would inevitably come to if you read Town Hall on a regular basis. The wesbite that boasts of being the first conservative web community seems to have a yen for anti-atheist propaganda. For example, here's Mike Adams in a column entitled, “Understanding Atheism:: If psychologists were really interested in the fair and balanced treatment of religion they would see the obvious connection between cognitive dissonance theory and atheism. And, of course, they would discuss it in their classes in conjunction with the application of Freudian and Skinnerian…

Other Tidbits From The Republican Debate

The New York Times has posted a transcript of the big Republican candidates deabte. So, as promised, let's have a look at some other items of interest. Here's Governor Huckabee trying desperately to avoid saying he believes global warming is a real problem: MR. VANDEHEI: Governor Huckabee, this question comes from Curtis Waldman (sp) from Boca Raton, Florida. Thousands of reputable scientists have concluded with almost certainty that human activity is responsible for the warming of the Earth. Do you believe global warming exists? GOV. HUCKABEE: The most important thing about global warming…

The New Pangaea

Thanks again for the comments on my previous two posts about eugenics. As a novice blogger, I was surprised by their focus. I expected comments about the past--the historical significance of the eugenics movement--but instead the future dominated, with assorted speculations about the possible futures that genetic engineering could bring to our species. By coincidence, I've been thinking about the future as well, but from a different angle, thanks to a pair of papers in press at Trends In Ecology and Evolution. Instead of introduced genes, they're interested in introduced species. Before…

The Year in ID

What a year it has been for the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design movement! Below the fold, I detail the advances that ID has made in the short time since Judge Jones delivered his ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover. January Dembski: Just as a tree that has been "rimmed" (i.e., had its bark completely cut through on all sides) is effectively dead even if it retains its leaves and appears alive, so Darwinism has met its match with the movement initiated by Phillip Johnson. Expect Darwinism's death throes, like Judge Jones's decision, to continue for some time. But don't mistake death…

More Bob Jones "Biology for Christian Schools" Howlers

A couple of weeks ago, I posted two ridiculous quotes that are found in the Bob Jones textbook that's involved in the California Creationism lawsuit. I'm still wading through these texts and Behe's report explaining why it's really a very good book for high school students to use to learn biology. It's a slow process, and a painful one, but I've found another couple of outstanding quotes to share with you. This time, I'm including three different types of quote. There are a couple where the authors say things have absolutely nothing to do with science of any kind (and are totally out to…

The President's Plan to help the uninsured: tax cuts for the rich

In his State of the Union Address tonight, Bush will announce a new "plan" to address the need for more affordable health care insurance. After reading the White House "Fact Sheet" on the plan, a phrase quickly jumps to mind - "dead on arrival." That one is quickly joined by others - "smoking crack," "bloody stupid," "give me a break," and "what mentally defective chimpanzee came up with this one?" The funniest thing about this particular proposal is exactly how stereotypically Bush it really is. Stripped down to its bearest essentials, there are two parts to this health care plan. One part…

Weak tea in defense of Mary Midgley

Nick Matzke has taken exception to my criticism of Mary Midgley, and has posted a rebuttal. Well, maybe. Probably not. Eh, I've read most of Midgley's books and articles, I don't think you [The Unpublishable Philosopher] or PZ getting her at all. The short version of what she's saying is that there is a lot more to life than simply scientifically assessing everything as if it was a hypothesis. The primary reason many people like their religion, despite its obvious problems from a scientific point of view, have to do with things like: providing a sense of community instilling values in…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Lots of new articles in four of seven PLoS journals. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Impact of Ocean Warming and Ocean Acidification on Larval Development and Calcification in the Sea Urchin Tripneustes gratilla: As the oceans simultaneously warm, acidify and increase in PCO2,…

Another Week of GW News, July 5, 2009

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose... July 5, 2009 Chuckle, Top Stories:Carbon Tariffs, G8, G8 Rankings, Meetings Galore, IRENA Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Methane, Education, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Climate Refugees, Wacky Weather,…

Should We Let Creationists Dictate Our Time: A Response to Tristero

In commenting on a post by SA Smith that rebuts (quite well) Behe's latest ID creationist idiocy, tristero writes (bold original; italics mine): But reading Smith's post on HIV evolution, I have to confess I can't for the life of me understand it. Ms Smith, I promise I'll spend some more time on it later and try to puzzle it out; I like that kind of a challenge (and please don't bother rewriting it for civilians, you've got better things to do!). But the tactic Behe is employing worries me, because it is so cynical, and dangerously effective. Essentially, id creationists are slowly trying to…

"Liquid Silver" Can Tarnish Life

By Joe Schwarcz PhD, Author, USASEF Expo Performer, AT&T Sponsored Nifty Fifty Program Speaker Physicians today are unlikely to encounter "Gilder's palsy." Nor are they likely to diagnose a patient with "hatter's shakes." But prior to the twentieth century these ailments had to be considered when a patient presented with tremors, irritability, increased salivation and fatigue. In the case of the hatters, the culprit was mercury nitrate used to produce felt. Beaver and rabbit fur, the traditional materials for making felt, can be matted more easily when the pelts are first treated with…

An Interview with Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science

For those of you who have been thirsting for more details on our newest ScienceBlogger since the introduction of his blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, here Page 3.14 offers an interview with Ed Yong. Among other juicy tidbits, Ed reveals that he once worked in research science but gave it up for writing. We can't help but be glad that he did! Starting out easy: What's your name? Ed Yong. I have no pseudonym and automatically incline towards people who write and post under their own names. Ed stands for Edmund, which apparently means "wealthy protector," and I have a Chinese name that…

Does evolution imply atheism?

We've got another troll in the comments — she wouldn't necessarily be a troll, except for the dead giveaway of asking the same question a dozen times and running away from any answer any of the non-troll commenters might give. The question is, "Does evolution imply atheism?", and I'm going to have to disagree with most of the people who have already answered it by giving a conditional yes. First, let's clear up the incoherence of the question. I understand it as, "Does understanding science [it's not just biologists who exhibit this phenomenon!] lead to an abandonment of religious beliefs?",…

If you build it, will they come?

Many regions in the United States, and the world for that matter, are seeking to entice biotech companies to relocate. As Lorraine Ruff and David Gabrilska describe in their Genetic Engineering News Article, "Metrics for Economic Development," the exhibitors at meetings like BIO work hard to: ".. entice founders and CEOs with a wide spectrum of inducements: institutional and technological excellence, free land, preferential tax rates, and low electricity and/or water rates. They punctuate the sale with regional culinary novelties: home of the famous crawfish (with plush toy), tasty sour mash…

"Braised enterovirus" and "Fuck the spring chicken"

Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD, not to be confused with a disease of cattle, Foot and Mouth Disease) is the result of an infection by one of several intestinal viruses, the most common being Coxsackie A and Enterovirus 71 (Ev71). HFMD is a fairly common contagious infection of infants and children that often appears in outbreak form in schools and daycare centers. Children with HFMD have fever, sore throat and characteristic lesions around the mouth and in the throat. Recently some very sizable outbreaks caused by Ev71 have been reported in China, Singapore and Mongolia, with thousands of…

Water Fixes Needed Nationwide

Most of us probably take our tap water for granted, but recent events remind us that we shouldnât. Salmonella contamination of the water supply in Alamosa, Colorado sickened over 300 people and left residents avoiding showers and drinking bottled water for a week. Abel Pharmboy explains that the city was one of the few that didnât have a water chlorination program â but thatâs changed now, and the episode reminds us that trace amounts of chlorinated acid byproducts in the water seem less alarming when compared to potentially fatal bacterial illness. Meanwhile, in Iowa, manure and…

New homebirth statistics show it's way too dangerous, and Mike Shermer on liberal denialism

Two links today for denialism blog readers, both are pretty thought provoking. The first, from Amy Tuteur, on the newly-released statistics on homebirth in Oregon. It seems that her crusade to have the midwives share their mortality data is justified, as when they were forced to release this data in Oregon, planned homebirth was about 7-10 times more likely to result in neonatal mortality than planned hospital birth. I'm sure Tuteur won't mind me stealing her figure and showing it here (original source of data is Judith Rooks testimony): Oregon homebirth neonatal mortality statistics, from…

Letting Go of the Farm

Fourteen years ago, on a cold February weekend, Eric, our 10 month old son, Eli and I went driving around rural upstate New York, looking for a place to settle. We had actually wanted to stay in Massachusetts, but a combination of high land and real estate prices and Eric's grandparents' (who would come to live with us and whose needs for care were a big part of our motivation to move) false European perception that somehow Massachusetts was much colder than upstate NY meant that New York was our best option. We explored, we adventured, we fell in love with the Schoharie Valley and its…

Why would a mutation in Google-cofounder, Sergey Brin, cause Parkinson's disease?

Lots of bloggers in the DNA network have been busy these past few days writing about Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, his blog, his wife's company (23andme), and his mutation in the LRRK2 gene. I was a little surprised to see that while other bloggers (here, here, here, and here) have been arguing about whether or not the mutation really increases the risk to the degree (20-80%) mentioned by Brin, no one has really looked into the structure and biochemistry of the LRRK2 protein to see if there's a biochemical explanation for Parkinson's risk. I guess that task is up to me. Let's begin at…

...And Justice for All?

tags: The Constitution of the United States of America, DNA Evidence, criminal trials, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr, Supreme Court, William G. Osborne, justice, ethics Some days, I am ashamed to be an American. These past two days, I've been astonished and outraged -- and ashamed -- by yesterday's 5-4 Supreme Court decision that prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence. This decision was inspired by Alaska prison inmate William G. Osborne's petition to be allowed to undergo DNA testing -- at his own expense -- to establish whether he is…

Classic papers in Public Health: Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories for the Year 1947 by E.R.A. Merewether

By David Ozonoff Annual Reports from governmental bodies aren’t often significant, much less classic, public health documents. By design they are confined to summaries of an agency’s work over a year’s time and they often don’t even appear until two or more years later. Such was the case for the Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories in Great Britain for the year 1947, which didn’t appear until 1949. Its author was the Chief Inspector himself, a pioneer in occupational health by the name of E. R. A. Merewether. Originally a general practitioner, Merewether found his way into public…

Gordy Slack replies

Yesterday, I ripped into Gordy Slack and the NY Times for bad articles on creationism. Now Slack has responded, and in the interest of fairness, I urge you to look at that comment and browse down to several others he has also made. He's still wrong, and I still find his article incredibly bad. Slack's article is titled "What neo-creationists get right: an evolutionist shares lessons he's learned from the Intelligent Design camp". I chewed him out because nothing in his list is anything that creationists got right — it's a litany of common scientific arguments and complaints — and all he's…

Back-of-the-Envelope Gravitational Which-Way

There's a new Science Express paper on interfering clocks today, which is written up in Physics World, with comments from yours truly. The quote is from a much longer message I sent-- with no expectation that it would end up as anything other than a pull quote, I might add, but I thought the background would be helpful. Since I ended up doing a back-of-the-envelope estimate for that, though, I thought I would reproduce some of the reasoning here. The basic proposal idea here is to do an atom interferometer inside a Ramsey interferometer for making an atomic clock. That is, before sending the…

The Danger of Radical Islam

Eugene Volokh had a couple of posts a few days ago about anti-religious speech and a movement to regulate it around the world. It begins with the UN Commission on Human Rights urging nations to "take resolute action to prohibit the dissemination through political institutions and organizations of racist and xenophobic ideas and material aimed at any religion or its followers" that might lead to harrassment, discrimination or hostility. Volokh notes that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, has publicly condemned a Danish newspaper for publishing a dozen caricatures of…

Think Before You Radiocarbon

Recently I organised a few days' excavation that didn't turn up the kind of stuff I was hoping for. Still, I brought some materials home that may serve to shed some light on what exactly it was we dug into. All those nondescript little pits, all those sooty hearths full of cracked stone -- when were they made and used? Enter radiocarbon. This dating method works on anything organic, that is, anything with carbon in it. Running one sample costs about $500, so you have multiple reasons to be smart about which samples you send to the lab. I thought my thinking about this might interest you, Dear…

Energy and Climate Change committee: new inquiry: IPCC 5th Assessment Review

So, da UK Energy and Climate Change committee is having an "inquiry" into IPCC 5th Assessment Review. I'm not sure why. This will be a review of a review, which could itself be reviewed, which will end in endless regress? More likely it will fizzle away into nothing. Myles Allen appears to be suggesting that the ctte are bozos (not in so many words, of course. That would be unparliamentary. Instead, he says things like the thrust of the committee’s questions does raise concerns that the committee has allowed itself to be misled in this regard or As an aside, it seems strange to ask about the…

More fallout from New Mexico garbage truck E. coli-gate - up from the comments

Here's an update on E. coli-gate in Tularosa, NM: Okay, so it's more than fluid - it's about a pint of sludge left in front of each house where the garbage truck stopped. But this is ridiculous: [Tularosa resident Ken] Riedlinger took samples from the sludge puddle to the Diagnostic and Technology Center in Alamogordo and they found a huge amount of E. coli, he said. "The upper tray reported it's infinite, the numbers were too great to count," Riedlinger said. "This is massive, massive E. coli. This is deadly stuff." E. coli is a bacterium found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals…

Sol Snyder on Finding God in the Brain

The first 2008 issue of New England Journal of Medicine came yesterday in the snailmail box and I read the following story with such great interest that I nearly walked into a tree. Bear with me but the news lately has taken me on a neuroscience streak without my having specific professional expertise in the area. The famed Johns Hopkins neuroscientist, Solomon H. Snyder, MD, DSc, has a commentary entitled, "Seeking God in the Brain - Efforts to Localize Higher Brain Function" (currently available as free full text). The commentary was very loosely directed at a study elsewhere in the issue…

Speed of illusory body movements alters the passage of time

YOUR brain has a remarkable ability to extract and process biological cues from the deluge of visual information. It is highly sensitive to the movements of living things, especially those of other people - so much so that it conjures the illusion of movement from a picture of a moving body. Although static, such pictures trigger dynamic representations of the body, 'motor images' containing information about movement kinematics and timing. Researchers at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London now show that biological motion is processed unconsciously, and that the speed of…

Single neurons have RAM-like activity

In his epic poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion, William Blake asks: "Where goest thou O thought? To what remote land is thy flight?" More than two centuries later, memory remains as one of the enduring mysteries of neuroscience, and despite decades of intensive research using modern techniques, we still have no answer to the questions posed by Blake. Traditionally, memory has been regarded as consisting of several distinct processes or storage systems. Short-term memory (sometimes referred to as working memory) stores information that is required for the task at hand, but is severely…

A Nobel Prize for The Shadow Network

This morning it was announced that two American scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and or Medicine, for their 1998 discovery of a hidden network of genes. It may seem odd that a network of genes could lurk undiscovered for so long. But the cell is very much a mysterious place. In the 1950s, scientists established the basic model for how genes work. A gene is made of DNA, the cell makes a single-stranded copy of a gene in a molecule called RNA, and it then uses the RNA as a template for building a protein. This so-called Central Dogma proved to be correct for many thousands of genes…

Why There Aren't Right-Handed Apes, Or: Handedness and The Evolution of Language

Although most humans are right-handed, other animals don't seem to show a similar motoric asymmetry. As Corballis mentions in his 2003 BBS article, even the great apes - our closest relatives in the animal kingdom - tend not to show a right-hand preference unless raised in captivity, suggesting handedness is learned through imitation of caregivers. So why should humans be the only species to show clear manual asymmetry, 9:1 in favor of righties? While manual asymmetry may be unique to humans, cerebral asymmetry is not. Corballis reviews how animals as diverse as frogs, birds, mice, rats,…

Prospective Memory: More Retrospective Among Children?

What processes allow us to execute delayed intentions? This ability, known as prospective memory, is often considered to have two constituent parts: a prospective component which involves forming the intention and possibly maintaining it until action execution, and a retrospective component which involves retrieving this intention, if that intention is not successfully and continuously maintained until the moment of action execution. These components can be easily illustrated. Imagine yourself in a situation where prospective memory is required: while at work, you realize that you need to…

Shake Off The Dust...

It's been a migrainey sort of week here at Chez Zuska, so in lieu of something new at the moment, I'm giving you a "best of Zuska" from the old blog site. By coincidence, it's also trash and recycling night here in my hometown. Read and decide for yourself. Shake Off The Dust Under Your Feet And as a follow-up to my last post, take a gander at what Female Science Professor has to say: At my university, there has never been a woman department chair in science, engineering, or math in the entire history of the university. A dean recently told me that it will probably be another decade or so…

Microbial species 4: degrees of sex

When we attempt to apply to organisms that are not obligately sexual (that is, which don't have to have sex to reproduce) concepts that were specified to use with those that are, we have problems. The Recombination Model is one such attempt. Sure, some microbial species exchange genes. Others do it more frequently and more completely. There appears to be a continuum of gene exchange all the way from almost never to almost every time. So why should we expect that gene transfer will provide us with the sort of homogeneity of lineages and quasispecies that it does in obligate sexuals? In part…

2009 theme: Sustainability

Like many others in the blogosphere, I've adopted the profgrrrrl model of defining a theme for each year rather than a list of resolutions. In 2008, my theme was "Seeking Strategies for Survival, Sanity, and Success." As I said a few weeks ago, the survival part was achieved, but beyond that, I'm not so sure. This year I'm going to take a slightly different tack on the same general idea, and I'm not moving from my spot in the alphabet. My theme for 2009 is Sustainability. As in, I'm going to focus on trying to live my life that is sustainable in the long run for my body, my mental health,…

How hard do academics with kids really have it compared to the rest of the working world?

So I meant to have a nice post today addressing Ecogeofemme's challenge of describing how we write papers/proposals, but I haven't actually managed to do any writing today like I was supposed to. Instead, I am going to point out the at times thoughtful, at times heated discussion going on around the blogosphere about whether academics with kids really have it harder than the rest of working adults. The discussion originated from an IHE piece about new studies that found that academics had lower birth rates than doctors or lawyers. From there, Dean Dad wrote a post with his observations on…

Coolest... Experiment... Ever

Yesterday, Steve of OmniBrain asked, "What is the coolest psychology experiment ever?" Feel free to provide your own answer in comments there and/or here. As for me, there are some that I think are really cool for theoretical reasons, but the coolest ever just for the sheer implausibility of the results has to be Daniel Simons and Daniel Levins' "real-world interaction" change blindness experiment. It simply boggles the mind. First, a little bit about change blindness. Check out this scene, and see how long it takes you to figure out what changes when the scene flashes. I'll give you a moment…

Broadly Misrepresenting

Last November Ray Pierrehumbert at RealClimate was very disappointed in a New York Times article by William Broad: The worst fault of the article, though, is that it leaves the reader with the impression that there is something in the deep time Phanerozoic climate record that fundamentally challenges the physics linking planetary temperature to CO2. This is utterly false, and deeply misleading. And: This article is far from the standard of excellence in reporting we have come to expect from the Times. We sincerely hope it's an aberration, and not indicative of the best Mr. Broad has to offer…

Book Review: In Which Sci Reads the Dictionary (Cambell's Psychiatric Dictionary, 9th Edition)

Originally posted by Scicurious On April 8, 2009, at 12:02 AM As I'm sure everyone knows by now, Sci LOVES getting books in the mail. Even if I paid for them, I still love seeing them show up in a box. Even better is when I pick them out of a store and get to cuddle them on the way home. So you can imagine how happy Sci was to see this show up at the door: I've always wanted a specialized psychiatric dictionary, almost as bad as I've wanted a specialized pharmacologic dictionary. It's a good thing to have handy, and is an even cooler thing to get in the mail. So Sci pranced around…

Philosopher Generalizes Beyond Experience

Janet pointed me to a post at the Philosopher's Playground about doing away with laboratory courses in the science curriculum. Steve Gimbel, the philosopher doing the playing, teaches at Gettysburg College. He argues that the lab portions of science classes cause non-science majors to avoid those courses and not enroll in any science class not required for graduation. If science courses consisted of more theory and less labs (by theory he means lecture, and, by choosing that word, he indicates he doesn't have much experience in non-physics science courses where the lectures consist of more…

A Handy Tip If Your Health Insurance Card Is Lost Or Stolen

As I recently reported, my mother's wallet was stolen last week, containing her bank card, driver's license, and insurance and Medicare cards. This has resulted in hours and hours of work for me to deal with replacing the cards, working with the bank to contest the fraudulent charges on her account, etc. I'm going to tell you something the health insurance company probably won't, because I'm not sure that the people who answer the phones even understand that their system works like this. When you call to report your lost or stolen insurance card, the insurance company will naturally want…

Disco. Inst. blogger: Straight people don't have stable relationships

It can be difficult to understand creationists at times. Last week, I observed Disco. Inst. blogger Martin Cothran wondered: "If their relationships are already stable, then why do they need to be stabilized?" Cothran only applies that logic to teh gays, of course. I pointed out that the same logic applies to straight folk, and that he seemed to be arguing against marriage per se. Apparently that wasn't what he meant, and Cothran is now trying to rework the argument: So maybe we could restate the question for Rosenau and see if we can break through the logical firewall he seems to have…

Finding Nemo

Climate experts have pointed out that Nemo, the very bad nor’easter that just hit the Northeastern US and Maritimes, is partly an effect of global warming. Some meteorologists have responded with an incorrect response, a recitation of a now tired and useless mumbling retort that I’m afraid may even have it origin among scientists who should know better, and at the very least was kept alive by them for far too long: “Well, you can’t really attribute any given weather event to climate change.” Some regular people who are not climate scientists have repeated that faleshood as well. Then there…

If Chernobyl is as bad as it gets, then GIVE ME MORE! The Annotated Version

With the current nuclear power plant kerfuffle1 in Japan, people are making comparisons with a TMI-Chernobyl scale, with TMI being a nuclear accident that is not bad at all2 and Chernobyl being the worst case scenario.3 This is actually very reassuring, because Chernobyl was really no big deal.4 The event itself killed dozens of workers and rescue personnel, but the number of people killed in nuclear power plant accidents in total, including Chernobyl and all the other active plant accidents ever, is still far lower in terms of energy produced by that method than the number of people killed…

Malthus Was Right

Well, maybe not Malthus, but Garrett Hardin and Paul Ehrlich -- the 1960's-era neomalthusian academicians -- have been right on the money.  There are hard limits to growth, and those limits are upon us.  This is the contention of Charles A. S. Hall and John W. Day, Jr., two systems ecologists who have published a paper in American Scientist. The paper is still behind a pay wall at the publication site, but a PDF copy can be obtained href="http://www.esf.edu/efb/hall/2009-05Hall0327.pdf">from Professor Hall's web site. (HT: href="http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5330#more">EROI Guy…

2010: Another bad year for the anti-vaccine movement, as the Special Masters rule

Perhaps you've heard of the case of Poul Thorsen. Perhaps not. Either way, that anti-vaccine movement was making a huge deal over this Danish psychiatrist and researcher for two reasons. First, he has become embroiled in some sort of scandal involving research funds at his former place of employment, Aarhus University, leading the ever-hyperbolic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to post a characteristic bit of conspiracy mongering nonsense to that font of anti-vaccine nonsense, The Huffington Post, in an article entitled Central figure in CDC Vaccine Cover-Up Absconds with $2M. The second reason is…

Popularity versus reliability in medical research

Two of the major themes on this blog since the very beginning has been the application of science- and evidence-based medicine to the care of patients and why so much of so-called "complementary and alternative" medicine, as well as fringe movements like the anti-vaccine movement, have little or--more commonly--virtually no science to support their claims and recommendations. One major shortcoming of the more commonly used evidence-based medicine paradigm (EBM) that has been in ascendance as the preferred method of evaluating clinical evidence. Specifically, as Dr. Kimball Atwood IV (1, 2, 3…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Allergy Antidotes

When I originally conceived of doing a weekly feature entitled "Your Friday Dose of Woo," I did it almost on a whim. Now that I've reached the second week, I've realized that this is going to be harder than I thought. No, it's not that it's hard to find suitable targets. Quite the opposite, in fact. There's just too much woo out there, that it's really hard to choose a suitable subject. I had a hellacious time trying to pick one particular instance of woo that tickled my fancy enough to dedicate a blog post to it. Of course, I did think about doing a followup to last week's Friday Dose of Woo…

Joe Mercola and raw milk faddism invade HuffPo

Since its very inception five years ago, The Huffington Post has been, to steal a phrase from Star Wars, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, at least when it comes to anything resembling medicine. Of course, that's the problem. Very little, if anything, published in HuffPo resembles actual science-based medicine. The vast majority of medicine published there consists either of anti-vaccine screeds that are beyond stupid, quantum woo courtesy of Deepak Chopra, or pure, dangerous quackery, such as advocating homeopathy for H1N1 and acid-base woo for cancer. It's so bad that on more than one…