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When PARADE goes woo

Having been sucked into the blogosphere for over four years now and having gotten the majority of my news online or from newsmagazines or the New York Times, I frequently forget that I'm not like the vast majority of people. Neither, I daresay, are my fellow ScienceBloggers or my readers. We don't get our information from the same sources, and we tend towards a lot more scientific sophistication than the average American. This is not to brag or to claim superiority; it is simply an observation that may help explain to some extent why those of us in the science blogosphere have a hard time…

Oh, no! GMOs are going to make everyone autistic!

She's baa-aack. Remember Stephanie Seneff? When last Orac discussed her, she had been caught dumpster diving into the VAERS database in order to torture the data to make it confess a "link" between aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and acetaminophen and—you guessed it!—autism. It was a bad paper in a bad journal known as Entropy that I deconstructed in detail around two years ago. As I said at the time, I hadn't seen a "review" article that long and that badly done since the even more horrible article by Helen Ratajczak entitled Theoretical aspects of autism: Causes–A review (which, not…

Homeopathy at UC-Irvine: The administration can run but it can't hide from its history of embracing quackery

Last week, the University of California, Irvine (UCI) announced that Susan and Henry Samueli were donating $200 million for it to set up a massive new integrative medicine initiative. The plan would basically transform biomedical sciences and medical education at UCI—and not in a good way. Remember what "integrative medicine" is. What is being "integrated" into medicine is, of course, quackery. Oh, sure, integrative medicine also emphasizes lifestyle modification, such as diet and exercise, but that is part of "conventional medicine" already. There is no good scientific or medical rationale…

The Mawson "vaxed/unvaxed" study retraction: The antivaccine movement reacts with tears of unfathomable sadness

Over the last couple of days, I've been writing about two incredibly bad "studies" by Anthony Mawson, an antivaccinationist and Andrew Wakefield fanboi, who first published one of them in a bottom-feeding predatory open access journal and saw it retracted. Then he appears to have divided the study up two minimal publishable units and had them published as two papers in a bottom-feeding predatory open access journal even lower on the food chain that the first, after having promoted its second coming among the antivaccine crowd. Obviously, I'm not going to go into the details of each study's…

Birds in the News 59 (v2n10)

Nesting Pacific loon, Gavia pacifica. Photograph by PicsMan. Birds in Science Two carefully planned sets of experiments to be published on Friday in the top-tier peer-reviewed journal, Science, show intelligent birds and great apes can plan into the future in a way that transcends simple food caching, as squirrels, foxes and other animals do. "Together with recent evidence from scrub jays, our results suggest that future planning is not a uniquely human ability, thus contradicting the notion that it emerged in hominids only within the past 2.5 to 1.6 million years," wrote Nicholas Mulcahy…

The kind of thing that makes industry 'science' look bad.

In a post last week, I mentioned a set of standards put forward by Carol Henry (a consultant and former vice president for industry performance programs at the American Chemistry Council), who says they would improve the credibility of industry-funded research. But why does industry-funded research have a credibility problem in the first place? Aren't industry scientists (or academic scientists whose research is supported by money from industry) first and foremost scientists, committed to the project of building accurate and reliable knowledge about the world? As scientists, aren't they…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: It's not just a breast massage, it's a Brassage!

I'm tired of blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense again. Don't get me wrong, I had an enormous amount of fun writing my commentary on Fire Marshal Bill's attempt to explain vaccine/autism pseudoscience. It was a hoot, if I do say so myself, but it depresses me that writing such posts is so necessary so often. Fortunately, it's Friday, and you know what that means (well, at least some of the time, anyway). That's right, it's time for some woo. This time around, it's not just any woo. In fact, it's woo that relates to my area of expertise. As you may recall, I do a lot of breast cancer surgery…

Winning friends and influencing people the Handley way

You may have noticed that I've been laying off the antivaccination movement recently. Indeed, it's been over two weeks since I last mentioned the topic, and then I only did so by briefly citing a post by Steve Novella. For this blog, aside from vacations, that has to be a record. Truth be told, periodically I get really burned out on the topic, as I've pointed out from time to time. I frequently make jokes about the thermonuclearly burning stupid that regularly emanates from such "luminaries" of the antivaccine movement as Jenny McCarthy, David Kirby, Dan Olmsted, J. B. Handley, and others.…

Dr. Oz's evolution as America's foremost promoter of quackery continues apace

I've often written of "black holes of stupid" that threaten to rupture the fabric of the space-time continuum, so dense and full of stupid are they. Such black holes tend to come from places like the wretched hive of scum and antivaccine quackery known as Age of Autism, the wretched hive of scum and conspiracy quackery known as NaturalNews.com, and various other sites loaded with pseudoscience throughout the web. I've often also joked about some post or other from such people "frying my irony meter." Usually such comments are deserved when particularly clueless quacks write something that is…

Bill and Hillary Clinton embrace the quackery that is functional medicine

This might look somewhat familiar to people, but I have a good excuse. Yesterday was Easter, and, although by no stretch of the imagination can I be accused of being particularly religious, we still did have family to visit. Add to that the fact that I have a two talks to give today that as of Friday night I hadn't even started working on (OK, two versions of the same talk, which makes it perhaps 1.5 talks), and a little—shall we say?—creative recycling is in order. Even so, if you don't follow the other locales where my written meanderings may be found, it'll still be new to you. It all…

Inauguration day: How President Trump could undermine trust in vaccines

In a (very) few short hours, Donald Trump will take the oath of office and become the 45th President of the United States. I realize that I don't normally blog about politics, at least other than that related to medicine, but I make no bones about it. I'm dreading 12 Noon ET on January 20, 2017. There is more than enough reason for dread given the likely effect on medical science, at the very least. Also, Donald Trump is antivaccine. He's shown it through meetings with Andrew Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, the former of whom spoke a year ago on a "Conspira-Sea Cruise" and the latter of…

Radio reminder

It's almost time for Atheists Talk radio! This week, they are going to talk about secular wedding ceremonies. I have a personal interest; my own wedding was not at all secular, but was instead officiated by a full-of-himself Christian priest who felt such an arrogant sense of privilege that he ignored our request to keep it as non-sectarian as possible to instead preach at us a full-blast come-to-Jesus sermon. It always seemed to me that if you enter a contract in which one of the parties is entirely imaginary, it would weaken the bond. Fortunately, we wrote our own vows that we said to each…

Nature Precedings

A few days ago, Nature launched its newest Web 2.0 baby, the Nature Precedings. It is very interesting to see the initial responses, questions and possible misunderstandings of the new site, so browse through these posts and attached comments by Pedro Beltrao, Timo Hannay, Peter Suber (and again), Kaitlin Thaney, Jean-Claude Bradley, Guru, Egon Willighagen, Deepak Singh, ChemSpy, Putting Down A Marker, Maxine Clarke, Bryan Vickery, Clarence Fisher, David Weinberger, AJC, Euan Edie, Tim O'Reilly, Dean Giustini, Peta Hopkins, Eric, mrees, Sally Wyman, Michael Jubb, Alex Palazzo, Marie, Corie…

physicists can solve anything

there's a persistent urban legend out there, that the three body problem can not be solved this, of course, is not true: so when XKCD promulgates the myth, the time comes when a stand must be taken click to embiggen sigh. The classical problem of the solution of the motion of three bodies, moving under the influence of Newtonian gravitational dynamics only, is an old one. The difficulty of the problem was quickly realised in the context of predicting the orbit of the Moon - just the Earth-Moon-Sun problem, though well posed, is extremely hard to even get to the point of having a formalism…

Concavenator: an incredible allosauroid with a weird sail (or hump)... and proto-feathers?

The last few weeks have been pretty exciting for people interested in theropod dinosaurs.... but then, you could say this about most weeks: new theropods are constantly being published. Last week saw the publication of the weird, functionally two-fingered, short-footed maniraptoran Balaur bondoc from the latest Cretaceous of the HaÅ£eg Basin in Romania (Csiki et al. 2010) [left foot of Balaur shown here, from BBC News]. When Balaur was alive, the Hateg region was an island, so this was another of those weird, island-dwelling dinosaurs we've often hoped would exist. I have a vested personal…

Um... wow. Read this.

I just read this on Denialism Blog, and simply had to send it out to all of you, just in case you don't subscribe to that awesome blog. What follows will scare and anger you - at least, that was my reaction. Some people are so self-deluding that they are willing to kill millions of people to support their own twisted mindset. Said people are sick, in that should-be-criminally-responsible-for-it kind of way. The following is a chapter, removed from Ben Goldacre's new book Bad Science due to libel litigation from the quack, Matthias Rath, in response to Goldacre's description of his activities…

UN Report on Denmark and Caricatures

The UN report that I mentioned the other day concerning Denmark and the uproar over the Muhammed caricatures is now available online, but not in English. Agora (not to be confused with In the Agora) has a partial translation here and a post on the subject here. It provides a good opportunity to look at how legal language can be vague enough to mean whatever someone wants it to mean. Listen to this bureaucratic nonsense from the UN representative: Their uncompromising defense of a Freedom of Speech without limits or restrictions is not in accordance with the international rules which are based…

Undecided voters aren't really undecided - the hidden side of decision-making

Elections are weighing heavily on our minds. In three short months, America will see the race between Barack Obama and John McCain come to a head, while we in Britain will probably have a general election within the next few years. Some people, of course, will vote based on long-held loyalties to a specific political party, but many of us are more malleable in our choices. What affects the choices of these undecided voters? People are given to viewing ourselves as rational beings and as such, we'd like to think that our choices are fuelled by objective and careful deliberation. So we pay…

Political Science: The Bush Administration Snubs Its Science Adviser

Folks: Here's another old article I wrote that wasn't online. You could say this is the article that started it all...my 2001 report on how John Marburger had been marginalized in the Bush administration. We're talking old school....but at the same time, this kind of writing ultimately led to The Republican War on Science. Political Science: The Bush administration snubs its science adviser The American Prospect December 3, 2001 MOST PEOPLE ARE DEMOTED FOR POOR PERFORMANCE. Dr. John H. Marburger, President Bush's newly confirmed science adviser, was kicked down a notch before he even started…

Two awful no-good terribad miserable arguments

They keep dragging me back in. I try to drop it, but my inbox is full of people still arguing this point, and it's getting ridiculous. The thing is, they keep throwing godawfully bad arguments at me, as if they're trying to hit me in the head with a brick enough times to make me stupid enough to believe them. It's not going to work. Here are a few of the worst of the bad arguments. Let's stop the shouting that Richard Dawkins is some kind of raving misogynist. What's happened here is that he is at some remove from all of the details, and this issue got blown up by lunatics who felt their…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Paw-erful woo for paw-erful pets

It's been a pretty good week on the ol' blog here, with lots of good material to draw from, finishing up yesterday with my expression of disdain for the choice of Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award. I expected some blowback for my criticism, and I got some. However, I was surprised at how mild it was, at least from the one person I expected to defend the decision, P.Z. Myers. Quite frankly, his defense of the decision to select Bill Maher struck me as enormously half-hearted, in essence saying, "Sure he's a wingnut, but he's our wingnut, and, oh, by the way, all that quackery he…

The day after Thanksgiving: A bit of reading for you--and a "framing" response

Believe it or not, sometimes even Orac has a life. I know, I know, between the ridiculously logorrheic blogging here and other online activities, coupled with even more ridiculous long hours working at his day job, it's hard to conceive. However, my wife and I had a whole passel of relatives over, several of whom spent the night. This puts a crimp in the blogging activity, but for once I don't care that much. Fortunately, there's a lot of good reading out there, of which I picked a few examples: The "Gonzalez Trial" for Pancreatic Cancer: Outcome Revealed. Remember the Gonzalez trial? It was…

Philosophizing about Programming; or "Why I'm learning to love functional programming"

Way back, about three years ago, I started writing a Haskell tutorial as a series of posts on this blog. After getting to href="http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/01/haskell_a_first_step_into_mona_1.php">monads, I moved on to other things. But based on some recent philosophizing, I think I'm going to come back to it. I'll start by explaining why, and then over the next few days, I'll re-run revised versions of old tutorial posts, and then start new material dealing with the more advanced topics that I didn't get to before. To start with, why am I coming back to Haskell? What changed…

Fairness, Personal Action and Al Gore's House

Not long ago I was out at a dinner of climate activists, at the beginning of a conference I was at, and as we were climbing into the car of one of the program leaders, there was talk about whose car was messier. This is a competition I always win - I mentioned to them that not only do I have little kids in my car, messing it up, but I drive goats around in my Taurus. Several people asked me why I drive goats in a car, (which even to me seems like a reasonable question). The answer is that I am a farmer with goats, but I don't have a pick up truck, so when they go to be bred or to the vet,…

Active Learning Experiment: The First 1.6 Weeks

As mentioned a while back, I'm experimenting with "active learning" techniques in my intro courses this term. Specifically, I'm doing a variant of the "Peer Instruction" method developed by Eric Mazur and others. There are a few complications imposed by our calendar/ class schedule, but I'm giving it a shot, and I thought I'd report on what I'm doing and how it's going, for the benefit of readers who are interested, and on the off chance that some of my readers who are in education can give some feedback/ tips/ whatever. What I'm doing: The Peer Instruction method is based on shifting the…

UM's open shame, the Center for Spirituality & Healing

I'm quite proud, under most circumstances, to be affiliated with the University of Minnesota: it's an excellent university (and the Morris campus is the best within the system, although some of the other campuses argue about that), we've got great students, and we are a secular public institution dedicated to giving an affordable education to anyone. However, there is also one thing about the University of Minnesota which causes me great shame, and which I consider a betrayal of reason and evidence. I am speaking, of course, of the Center for Spirituality & Healing. Center for Bullshit…

Affecting Change One Citizen Scientist at a Time

Guest Blog By X-STEM Speaker Aaron A. Alford, PhD, MPH, PMP Hands-on learning and human connections are essential to STEM education. Without exception, all of the scientists that I know were inspired to enter STEM career tracks by someone who helped them make an emotional connection to science and discovery. As a scientist and an educator, I was absolutely thrilled to be a part of the X-STEM Extreme STEM Symposium and the USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. at the end of April. Both events provided a grand opportunity to interact with students and learners of all types…

Lab Visit Report: Biophysics

One of the many very cool things going on in the Laser Cooling Empire at NIST is a series of experiments using optical tweezers to study various biological systems. I used to share an office with the biochemist in the group, who was there to handle the wet chemistry that physicists are notoriously bad at. I've toyed with the idea of setting up an optical tweezers apparatus at Union-- the optical set-up is very simple-- so I spent a little while talking about it with Kris Helmerson, the PI on that project. He mentioned some cool things they were doing, one of which is explained very nicely in…

Sunday Sacrilege: Respect is not the same as obedience

Religion's voice is that of a spoiled child having a temper tantrum. I have been accused by PalMD of lacking empathy for believers; that's not quite right. My response to the Islamic uproar over the Florida preacher who was planning to burn the Koran on 11 September was to say that that's too bad, we have a right to destroy our own property, and that the responses people were making to this trivial event were hysterical and inappropriate. Informing me that the Muslims are genuinely and sincerely and deeply offended is not informative — contrary to the suggestion that I must have an empathy…

Varenicline (Chantix) For Alcoholism?

We already knew that rel="tag">varenicline could be used to help people stop smoking.  Now there is a report that it can help reduce alcohol consumption, at least for rats. This was reported in title="Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences">PNAS (Varenicline, an α4β2 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor partial agonist, selectively decreases ethanol consumption and seeking)on an open-access basis, and echoed in a report in Scientific American ( href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=ACE9FF1E-E7F2-99DF-31F26EC00AA05F4A&sc=I100322">Need a Cigarette and a…

The ethics of performance enhancing drugs in academe.

In the 20/27 December 2007 issue of Nature, there's a fascinating commentary by Cambridge University neuroscientists Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir. Entitled "Professor's little helper," this commentary explores, among other things, how "cognitive-enhancing drugs" are starting to find their way into the lifestyles of professors and students on university campuses, a development which raises some interesting ethical questions. The questions are sufficiently rich here that this post will just serve as my first attempt to get some of the important issues on the table and to open it up…

A postcard from academe: my tenure dossier.

You may have noticed a lull in my postings here. I've been laboring to put the finishing touches on my dossier for my sixth year review. This dossier is the document on which a succession of committees will be basing their decisions as to whether San José State University will be tenuring me and promoting me to associate professor, or whether they will be thanking me for my service and sending me on my way. It's an awful lot of responsibility to put in the clutches of a three-ring binder, don't you think? I should explain a little bit about the "retention, tenure, and promotion" (or RTP)…

Write some letters to save the Tripoli six.

As Revere notes, the trial of the Tripoli six is scheduled to resume on October 31. This means the time for serious action is now. As Mike Dunford points out, If you want to do something more than just get mad, if you want to try to change things, you will need to do more than read blog articles and post comments. You need to write people. You need to call people. You need to send faxes and emails. Honest to goodness, a letter on paper, in an envelope, addressed and stamped to get to its destination, is going to signal that this really matters to you in a way that emails will not -- because…

From the Archives: Three 2006 best science writing books

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one covers three books and is from March 1, 2007: The Best American Science Writing 2006 by Gawande, Atul, editor & Jesse Cohen, series editor The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006 by Greene, Brian, editor…

Mike Adams noticed that the Tribeca Film Festival has yanked Andrew Wakefield's antivaccine film. Hilarity ensues.

I knew it wouldn't take long. I just knew it. The moment I learned that Robert De Niro had reversed himself and decided to pull Andrew Wakefield's dishonest antivaccine propaganda "documentary" from his Tribeca Film Festival after having admitted that he was the one who had greased the wheels to get it accepted for screening there, I knew the conspiracy theories would fly fast and furious. And so they have. So agitated by De Niro's decision are antivaxers that the chief antivaccine loon at his very own wretched hive of scum and quackery, Mike Adams, wrote not one, not two, but three posts in…

Comments of the Week #15: From cosmic impostors to the real deals!

"The real deal is always going to win in the end." -Bill Hybels I always do my best to cut through the hype and give it to you straight here at Starts With A Bang, and that means telling you the secrets of the Universe and the truth about our physical reality to the absolute best of our knowledge. In turn, you do your thing and let me know what you think, what else you want to know, and what just doesn't sound right to you in the comments here on our forum. Over the past week, we've covered the following topics: What are supernova impostors? (for Ask Ethan), The world's first Vine from space…

Comments of the Week #100: From wave-particle duality to leap day

“A great accomplishment shouldn't be the end of the road, just the starting point for the next leap forward.” -Harvey Mackay Tomorrow is such a big, rare day that it only comes once every four years (or 4.1237 years, for a little greater precision), yet practically every day offers something new and wonderful here at Starts With A Bang. If you missed anything over the past week, here's what we've taken a peek at: Do gravitational waves exhibit wave-particle duality? (for Ask Ethan), Astronomers push the limits of Hubble (for Mostly Mute Monday), Sorry, but lasers aren't taking you to Mars in…

Medical marijuana for autism and autism biomed quackery: One in the same and on the verge of approval in Michigan

When I first started writing about the claims made for medical marijuana and the cannabis oil derived from it, it didn't take long for me to characterize medical claims for cannabis as the "new herbalism," as opposed to pharmacognosy, the branch of pharmacology devoted to the study of natural products. The reason is simple. Although I support legalization of marijuana for recreational use, when I look at how medical marijuana has been promoted as a "foot-in-the-door" prelude to legalization, I see testimonials and flimsy evidence ruling over all. I see all the hallmarks of alternative…

Postscript to Pittendrigh's Pet Project - Phototaxis, Photoperiodism and Precise Projectile Parabolas of Pilobolus on Pasture Poop

We have recently covered interesting reproductive adaptations in mammals, birds, insects, flatworms, plants and protists. For the time being (until I lose inspiration) I'll try to leave cephalopod sex to the experts and the pretty flower sex to the chimp crew. In the meantime, I want to cover another Kingdom - the mysterious world of Fungi. And what follows is not just a cute example of a wonderfully evolved reproductive strategy, and not just a way to couple together my two passions - clocks and sex - but also (at the very end), an opportunity to post some of my own hypotheses online.…

Friday Weird Sex Blogging - Postscript to Pittendrigh's Pet Project - Phototaxis, Photoperiodism and Precise Projectile Parabolas of Pilobolus on Pasture Poop

We have recently covered interesting reproductive adaptations in mammals, birds, insects, flatworms, plants and protists. For the time being (until I lose inspiration) I'll try to leave cephalopod sex to the experts and the pretty flower sex to the chimp crew. In the meantime, I want to cover another Kingdom - the mysterious world of Fungi. And what follows is not just a cute example of a wonderfully evolved reproductive strategy, and not just a way to couple together my two passions - clocks and sex - but also (at the very end), an opportunity to post some of my own hypotheses online.…

Friday Weird Sex Blogging - Postscript to Pittendrigh's Pet Project - Phototaxis, Photoperiodism and Precise Projectile Parabolas of Pilobolus on Pasture Poop

We have recently covered interesting reproductive adaptations in mammals, birds, insects, flatworms, plants and protists. For the time being (until I lose inspiration) I'll try to leave cephalopod sex to the experts and the pretty flower sex to the chimp crew. In the meantime, I want to cover another Kingdom - the mysterious world of Fungi. And what follows is not just a cute example of a wonderfully evolved reproductive strategy, and not just a way to couple together my two passions - clocks and sex - but also (at the very end), an opportunity to post some of my own hypotheses online.…

Postscript to Pittendrigh's Pet Project - Phototaxis, Photoperiodism and Precise Projectile Parabolas of Pilobolus on Pasture Poop

We have recently covered interesting reproductive adaptations in mammals, birds, insects, flatworms, plants and protists. For the time being (until I lose inspiration) I'll try to leave cephalopod sex to the experts and the pretty flower sex to the chimp crew. In the meantime, I want to cover another Kingdom - the mysterious world of Fungi. And what follows is not just a cute example of a wonderfully evolved reproductive strategy, and not just a way to couple together my two passions - clocks and sex - but also (at the very end), an opportunity to post some of my own hypotheses online.…

The Irony of Tim Jones: Climate Disruption in Missouri and GOP Politics

By now you are probably aware of the major flooding that happened over the last several days in Missouri. Larry Lazar gave us a guest post detailing his personal experiences in Eureka, where the flooding was extensive. This flooding is not over, but is simply moving down stream in the Mississippi watershed. It will take several days before this is over. We are long past the days when one can honestly say “you can’t attribute a given weather event to climate change.” Climate is weather long term, and weather is climate in the here and now. Climate has changed because of anthropogenic global…

The topic of the evolution of religion

Aristotle said that for any well-defined topic, there has to be an object of study. What is the object of the study of religion? Well, for a start, it is not God, but the conceptions and roles that gods play in religion. If a God exists, that object of study is not available to us to empirically measure, experiment with, and model. What we must study is the religions themselves. There appear to be several phenomena that fall under the rubric of "religion". First, and this is, I believe, a matter of our western-centric history, religion is defined as an experience. Various folk have held…

ScienceBlogs = ZombieBlogs

Unless you've been living under a rock, or you are the CEO of Seed Media Group (SMG), you are well aware that Bora Zivkovic left ScienceBlogs 24 hours ago. Shockingly, despite this important loss, Adam Bly, CEO of SMG, has not communicated with any of us who remain at ScienceBlogs about this loss either by telephone, email, text, twitter, carrier pigeon or even with smoke signals. As far as I am concerned, ScienceBlogs is now ZombieBlogs, the undead, a heartless and soulless brain-eating monster that once was a beautiful living ideal. A significant number of us have been planning a strike,…

Framing and ethics (part 1).

If it's spring, it must be time for another round of posts trying to get clear on the framing strategies advocated by Matthew C. Nisbet, and on why these communications seem to be so controversial among scientists and science bloggers. My past attempts to figure out what's up with framing can be found here: Movie screening expulsion: whose hearts and minds are up for grabs? Trying to understand framing. Trying to understand framing (II): draw me a picture. Trying to understand framing (III): the example of stem cell research. Minor epiphany about framing. The present post has been prompted…

Acupuncture works for polycystic ovary syndrome except when it doesn't--which is always

For some reason, when it comes to so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) therapies, acupuncture gets a pass. Homeopathy, for example, is based on ideas so inherently ridiculous that they quite properly attract the scorn of skeptics and advocates of science-based medicine everywhere, stating, as it does, that diluting a remedy to nonexistence makes it stronger, but only if you shake vigorously between each serial dilution step. The same is true of reiki, which, as I've said time and time again, is nothing more than faith healing based on Eastern mystical beliefs rather than…

A pharma shill here, a pharma shill there, pharma shills everywhere!

If there's one thing I've learned about the antivaccine movement over the decade-plus that I've been following and commenting on it, it's that there are many flavors of antivaccine beliefs. These range from the "loud and proud" (and, invariably, incredibly stupid) antivaccine activists who aren't afraid of the label. They'll tell you that they're antivaccine and back that assertion up by demonizing vaccines as not just ineffective but downright toxic and deadly. On the other end of the spectrum are what I like to refer to as "vaccine averse," parents who have heard the message of the…

Quackademic medicine infiltrates a major cancer conference

As if yesterday's post weren't depressing enough, last weekend I attended the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago, which is part of the reason I didn't produce much in the way of posts about a week ago. Last Sunday, while aimlessly wandering from session to session and checking Twitter and e-mail between sessions, I noticed that a lot of people, including the official ASCO Twitter feed @ASCO, were Tweeting and re-Tweeting a link to this official story from ASCO, "Integrative Oncology Can Add Benefit to Traditional Cancer Treatments." It was…

Denying AIDS - A book by Seth Kalichman

Seth Kalichman is a better man than I. Kalichman is a clinical psychologist, editor of the journal Aids and Behavior and director of the Southeast HIV/AIDS Research and Evaluation (SHARE) product, and he has devoted his life to the treatment and prevention of HIV. Despite a clear passion for reducing the harm done by HIV/AIDS, to research this book he actually met, and interviewed, prominent HIV/AIDS denialists. I confess I simply lack the temperament to have done this. To this day, when I read about HIV/AIDS denialists, and the the 330,000 people who have died as a result of HIV/AIDS…