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Impact Unclear of NIOSH/OSHA Respirator Recommendations for Gulf Clean-up Workers

by Eileen Senn, MS OSHA and NIOSH have now officially recommended the use of respirators by the offshore Gulf cleanup workers closest to the crude oil, including those drilling relief wells, applying dispersant, and providing support and supplies. While respirators are not generally recommended for onshore and nearshore workers, there are exceptions for workers if they are near to or downwind of burning oil, far from shore, performing high pressure washing, cleaning fresh crude oil from wildlife, or experiencing symptoms or health problems. Recommendations are also given for the care of…

Yes, Virginia, unlike CAM, science-based medicine does change based on science

"Alternative medicine," so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), or, as it's become fashionable to call it, "integrative medicine" is a set of medical practices that are far more based on belief than science. As my good bud and collaborator Mark Crislip so pointedly reminded us last week, CAM is far more akin to religion than science-based medicine (SBM). However, as I've discussed more times than I can remember over the years, both here and at my not-so-super-secret-other blog, CAM practitioners and advocates, despite practicing what is in reality mostly pseudoscience-based…

No, cell phones are not "cooking men's sperm"

I've written several times over the years about the overblown claims of harm attributed, largely—but not exclusively—by cranks, to cell phone radiation. It's been claimed that radiation from cell phones can cause brain tumors (there's no convincing evidence that this is true), breast cancer (the evidence for these claims is so incredibly flimsy—and featured by Dr. Oz, to boot!—that this is not a credible claim), and a wide variety of other health issues. Indeed, if you believe the cranks, the mobile phone companies are the equivalent of tobacco companies denying that their products cause…

Another Week of GW News, February 17, 2008

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) Top Stories:UN CC Session, Investor Summit, AAAS Annual Meeting, ZIFs Melting Arctic, Border Jousting, Dead Zones, Earth Hour, Climate Code Red Hurricanes, Paleoclimate, ENSO, THC Impacts, Forests, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel Mitigation, Transportation, Shipping GHGs, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Planktos, Adaptation Journals, Misc. Science Kyoto-2,…

Lenski gives Conservapædia a lesson

Once again, Richard Lenski has replied to the goons and fools at Conservapædia, and boy, does he ever outclass them. For a quick outline of the saga, read this summary at A Candid World; basically, Andy Schlafly has been demanding every bit of data from Richard Lenski's work on the evolution of E. coli, despite the fact that Schlafly doesn't have the background to understand it and doesn't have any plan for what he would do with it if he got it. Lenski has been polite and helpful in his replies; his first response is a model for how to explain difficult science to a bullying ideologue. Now…

A Cleveland Clinic doctor's antivaccine rant: Facilitated by a culture of pseudoscience and published with the knowledge of the Clinic's communications office

The fallout from the social media firestorm from the antivaccine rant written by the Medical Director of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute and published by Cleveland.com last Friday has abated but far from faded away. The offending physician, Dr. Daniel Neides, was forced to issue an apology, which was one of the least convincing apologies I've ever seen, and The Cleveland Clinic issued a statement announcing its commitment to vaccines and that Dr. Niedes would suffer some as yet undetermined "disciplinary action." Reactions outside of The Cleveland Clinic ranged from the suitably…

150 years ago today

It is one thing to remember the date of an anniversary and quite another to truly recognize the significance of it. When it comes to Charles Darwin it seems that we have too much of the former and not enough of the latter, especially concerning what transpired 150 years ago today. Many are saying that today is the 150th birthday of natural selection, yet this is not really true. William Wells, Patrick Matthew, and Edward Blyth all preceded both Darwin and A.R. Wallace in print, each scratching the surface of the idea of natural selection but either misconstuing it as a preservative mechanism…

Indians as hybrids (a.k.a Aryan invasion in the house!)

A few months ago a friend tipped me off to the fact that David Reich was going to publish a paper about the genetics of Indians which he ascertained was going to model these populations as hybrids between "Europeans and Andaman Islanders." The paper is out, and my friend was roughly right. Reconstructing Indian population history: India has been underrepresented in genome-wide surveys of human variation. We analyse 25 diverse groups in India to provide strong evidence for two ancient populations, genetically divergent, that are ancestral to most Indians today. One, the 'Ancestral North…

Putting Me in My Place

The first thing you need to know about my farm is that it is huge. I mean enormous - by world standards. The vast majority of the world's farms - more than 80%, are very small farms, of less than 2 hectares (about 5 acres), and they produce the majority of the world's staple crops and calories. I suspect most folks in most of the Global North will find that a little surprising. The term "farm" in the US tends be applied most often to very large farms. We have a strong internal sense that small scale agriculture is particularly unsuited to growing staples. Most small farms in the US…

Stephanie Seneff: Following the Geiers dumpster-diving in the VAERS database

As I looked over the ol' blog last night, I was shocked to realize that I haven't blogged about the antivaccine movement and its offenses against science in nearly three weeks. That's right! The last time I did a vaccine post was when I examined a particularly egregiously bad paper from a couple of scientists who have drunk deeply of the antivaccine Kool Aid and as a result are trying to blame the HPV vaccine Gardasil for the death of an 18-year-old woman in Australia and a 14-year-old girl in Quebec. It's amazing but true. Rarely do I go that long without antivaccine pseudoscience attracting…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The best woo is breast woo

I realize that I've been neglecting my woo. Indeed, yesterday I noticed that it's been a month and a half since I did a real Friday Dose of Woo. Of course, that particular installation of my long-running blog series (over two and a half years!) was some incredibly powerful woo. In fact, it was titanic, mind-bogglingly amazing woo. We're talking Lionel Mllgrom-grade woo. Actually, we're talking Lionel Milgrom himself, a level of sheer looniness that few, if any, can match, much less surpass. Once you've experienced the sheer power of his quantum homeopathic madness, it's hard not to become…

At the Expense of the Future: Explaining the Success of Climate Science

A new concern arose around the turn of the 21st century, among the advancements in technology and science: what is the future of our planet's climate? This is a bold question, considering traditional problems with predicting the future. We have no evidence of future events, due to the asymmetry of time. It is difficult even to reconcile different interpretations of present conditions, because of epistemological flaws in our methods of observation. In the face of such uncertainties, and with fortunetelling abandoned along with magical thinking many years before, can science provide useful…

The FDA cracks down on bogus cancer "cures." Will this be the last time this happens until after Trump?

I was going to write about this yesterday, but seeing a family of a child with terminal cancer seduced by the siren call of Stanislaw Burzynski and his antineoplaston quackery distracted me and I had to blog about it. It's actually an appropriate lead-in to this story, which was based on an announcement by the FDA that it was sending warning letters to 14 companies for selling products that they claimed were treatments for cancer: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today posted warning letters addressed to 14 U.S.-based companies illegally selling more than 65 products that fraudulently…

How popular is quackery? A Harris Poll answers: Very, particularly among Millennials!

One of the central messages that apologists for the use of alternative medicine and, particularly the integration of the unscientific and mystical treatment modalities of alternative medicine with real medicine—a phenomenon known as “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, more recently, “integrative medicine”—is that it’s popular. Oh. So. Popular. If you believe the promoters of these modalities, CAM modalities are used by almost everyone and loved by nearly as many people. I exaggerate, but only a little. It’s basically an appeal to popularity, one of the ultimate logical…

Fantasy Vs. Reality - A Human History

Note: I'm off to DC for ASPO-USA's annual spring board meeting. The blog will be quiet. I leave you with one of my all-time favorite re-runs, lightly updated to reflect the ongoing disconnect between dream and reality ;-). But what would life be without fantasy? I find it helpful to reflect on how the world outside and inside my heads meet and fail to meet when I test my own assumptions. Fantasy, 1977: When I grow up I am going to be a doctor and garbage collector by day, driving my super-cool garbage truck on rounds, and at night, will become Wonder Woman, complete with breasts and magic…

And yet another political roundup...

Under the fold.... Alaska is right next to Russia: She was referring to the Diomede Islands which straddle the International Date Line in the Bering Straits. Big Diomede is on the Russian side of the line and Little Domede is on the Alaskan side. There is a village of about 150 Eskimos on Little Diomede who live mostly by fishing and walrus hunting. The islands are only two and a half miles apart, so it's easy to see one from the other on a clear day. In the winter when the ice is frozen you can walk across in about an hour. Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black Dude Watch, #82: That,…

Missing the Point in the Accommodationism Debate

I should probably warn you that this is a long one. So either get comfortable or go elsewhere! Josh Rosenau has a post up, replying to this earlier post from Jerry Coyne, who was discussing this L. A. Times article about the recent secular humanist conference in Los Angeles. At the conference there was a panel discussion between Chris Mooney, Genie Scott, P. Z. Myers and Victor Stenger on everyone's favorite topic: Accommodationism! During his presentation, Mooney repeated some of the sentiments from his USA Today op-ed discussing the notion of “atheist spirituality.”. I discussed some…

The Supreme Court rules on Bruesewitz v. Wyeth and vaccine injury cases

Hard as it is to believe, it's been nearly a year since I first learned that the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case regarding the legitimacy of the vaccine court. The long version can be found here, but the short version is that last March SCOTUS agreed to hear a case regarding the constitutionality of the law that set up the Vaccine Court back in the 1980s. As you might recall, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was passed in 1986 in order to establish a no-fault compensation system for children who suffer vaccine injury. The NCVIA was necessary because a flood of lawsuits in the…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Reprogram your DNA!

DNA is an amazing molecule. How evolution could have, over eons, fashioned such an amazingly simple yet complex method of storing biological information and coding the proteins that carry out the functions of life is one of the great wonders of biology. Harnessing the power of DNA, through genetic engineering, the study of the genome, and epigenetics, has allowed scientists a deeper insight than ever before possible into diseases as diverse as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and inherited metabolic disorders, to name a few. I manipulate DNA in my laboratory, in order to make it do my bidding…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Crystals, crystals everywhere, but no woo to amplify

Hard as it is to believe, this little weekly vanity project of mine, this little weekly excursion into the wild and wacky world of woo, is fast approaching two years of existence. Really. I kid you not. This wouldn't really disturb me so much except that I had been rather hoping to do a special anniversary edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo in a couple of weeks, but I really don't have anything suitable. No, it's not that I don't have lots of woo in the infamous Folder of Woo. There's stuff there for the foreseeable future. It's just that I'm like a little kid. When a really, really good…

So, you want to be an astrophysicist? Part 2.5 - grad school

Gleðileg Jól! Another blast from the past of Ye Olde Blogge You're in grad school. Yay. Now wtf do you do... Well, you need to jump through the hurdles first. Most places have some course and seminar requirements, you may in some cases test out of them or waive them, but think about whether you really want to. Odds are that your undergraduate curriculum was not complete or advanced enough in at least some areas. Yes, you want to get on with research, but you also want to be solid on the fundamentals. Take the stoopid exams, whatever they call them, usually some variation on candidacy or comps…

A particularly odious antivaccine "warrior" doubles down on her attacks on a 12-year-old boy who made a pro-vaccine video

A couple of days ago, I told the tale of a really bright and justifiably snarky 12-year-old boy named Marco Arturo, who posted a video of himself on Facebook with the caption “Vaccines DO cause autism”: I know I posted that video just two days ago, but it’s so epic that I can’t resist posting it again, particularly given how it went viral and how its going viral drove antivaccinationists out of their minds. They posted online attacks that included comments like: “I want to punt Marco in the jugular though honestly. ?“ (As if the laughing emoticon makes up for expressing the desire to kick…

Could Superman's X-Ray Vision Really Exist?

So how does Superman do it! He can see through buildings and clothing (he checks out Lois Lane's underwear in Superman 1 - more on this later). Many have attempted to answer this question of the ages yet few have explored this in as much depth as J.B. Pittenger who published a study in the journal Perception back in the stone ages (1983) entitled "On the plausibility of superman's x-ray vision" But first, before we get into the meat of the paper, lets see what others around the InterWebs have said about Superman's amazing seeing through underwear powers. In Correcting Misconceptions…

A trifecta of naturopathic woo

Yesterday, I wrote a rather lengthy post about germ theory denialism. As I put it, yes, there really are people who don't accept the germ theory of disease. As part of my Orac-ian length discussion (well over 4,000 words), I had a bit of fun with a video done by a hapless (is there any other kind?) naturopath named "Dr. Shawn." Our new buddy Dr. Shawn laid down a heapin' helpin' of napalm-grade burning stupid in the form of only the finest germ theory denialism coupled with some truly brain dead analogies, not to mention a whole lot of hating on swamps. Last night, exhausted by an even longer…

The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor

A few weeks ago, we wrote about an exciting new book, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi by Les Leopold (Chelsea Green 2007). The following is an excerpt from the book, reprinted here with permission of the publisher. For more information, go to www.chelseagreen.com, where you can also watch a short film honoring Tony Mazzocchi. Mazzocchiâs antiwar organizing did not distract him from his quest for national health and safety legislation. The workers who had been drawn to Mazzocchiâs road shows across the country had provided poignant congressional…

Japan Nuclear Disaster Update 30: It was, is, and will be worse than you thought

Perhaps the most interesting single thing on the table in today's update is the revelation that at least one of Fukushima's reactors suffered sufficient damage from the earthquake that hit the region ... prior to the tsunami ... to have likely gone out of control or melted down. This is hard to assess because the tsunami caused so much additional damage as to obscure earlier damage, and because cleanup efforts are not proper forensic methods to reconstruct what happened there, and because we can assume at this point that the untrustworthy TEPCO will cover up whatever it can, and it is in…

Another Week of GW News, December 18, 2011

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years 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 Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdomDecember 18, 2011 Chuckles, Durban, Horn of Africa, Canada & Kyoto, AGU, Retro Bottom Line, Ecocide, Cook, Post CRU, FOI Weapon Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs,…

Birds in the News 152

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Sanderlings, Calidris alba, at Bolivar Flats, Texas. Image: Joseph Kennedy, 24 June 2008 [larger view]. Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/1500s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400 . Birds in Science Birdsong is the primary model system that helps scientists understand how the brain produces complex sequences of learned behavior, such as playing the piano. In songbirds, there are many interconnected brain regions that play specific and important role in the production of song. It was hypothesized…

I've Got to...Keep...Control: Dancing the Time Warp to Explain Away Peak Oil

(Yes, I will eventually explain this ;-)) I don't usually participate in the Huffington Post bashing that goes on at science blogs. Not because I don't often agree with it, but because my colleagues seem to have it covered when it comes to autism/vaccine links and dubious medical studies. Still, Raymond Learsy's column about Wikileaks did catch my attention, and it seems to have all the best qualities of a bad HuffPo piece. If it's in Wikileaks, it's got to be true. Certainly it was a moment of triumphal satisfaction for the Peak Oil Pranksters. There it was in "cloud" black and white…

GcMAF, autism "biomed," and the apparent suicide of an autism quack

Three weeks ago, I did a post about how prone the antivaccine movement is to conspiracy theories. At that time, one example that I used was the then-very recent death of an autism quack and antivaccinationist (but I repeat myself) who's been big in the "autism biomed" movement for a long time and a regular fixture at autism quackfests like Autism ONE for many years. I'm referring, of course, to Jeff Bradstreet, whose body was found in a river on June 19, dead from a gunshot wound to the chest that appeared to have been self-inflicted. It didn't take long (less than a week) for the antivaccine…

The Gender Knot: Ch. 1 Discussion - "Where Are We?" Part 2

Welcome to our discussion of The Gender Knot by Allan Johnson. This is the second post in the discussion series. We will be discussing Chapter 1 "Where Are We?" You can find all posts connected to this discussion here. As noted before, there is an updated edition of the book now available. In the first post, I was working with the 1997 edition. I now have the new edition and this post is based on that edition. The first chapter is available online here. If you haven't had a chance to read the chapter, maybe you'd like to go now and read the pages covering "Women and Patriarchy" and "…

What Is Adapting in Place?

Today is the first day of our Adapting in Place Class - if you are interested I still have 2 paid spots ($175 for the six week online asynchronous class - or equivalent barter) and have had two scholarship spots open up for low income participants (one through someone not taking a spot and one, kindly through donation!) . Please email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com if you'd like to join the class. You can see the syllabus two posts down. So what is Adapting In Place anyway? I'm writing a book about it (coming out next fall), I talk about it a lot, but what exactly am I getting at? It is…

NWSA Conference Redux

Just over a month ago I was just starting the main part of the National Women's Studies Association conference. I finally have a few minutes now to share with you some of the ideas and sessions I went to at the conference. Sorry it's not liveblogging - there wuz no Internetz at the conference center *gasp*. I pretty much just sat in the science and technology studies sessions, with the exception of the initial keynote address. A caveat - if you are the author or also attended the session, please feel free to correct my recollection! NWSA is a hard conference for me to sit in, as it requires…

Yet again, acupuncture does not work for menopausal hot flashes

Arguably, one of the most popular forms of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) being "integrated" with real medicine by those who label their specialty "integrative medicine" is acupuncture. It's particularly popular in academic medical centers as a subject of what I like to refer to as "quackademic medicine"; that is, the study of pseudoscience and quackery as though it were real medicine. Consider this. It's very difficult to find academic medical centers that will proclaim that they offer, for example, The One Quackery To Rule Them All (homeopathy). True, a lot of…

Of Coal Stoves and Goat Herders: Getting Out of the Vicious Circle

Energy Bulletin ran this excellent piece from the New York Times on a crisis facing Mongolian Goat Herders who are attempting to deal with unstable world markets, climate change and overgrazing. I was fascinated by the clear way that the author of the piece lays out the vicious circle that they've entered into, and I was struck by how useful an example it is of the kind of ecological vicious circle that we face all the time: To compensate for low prices, herders have been increasing supply by breeding more goats -- a classic vicious circle. Mongolia's goat population is now approaching 20…

On Entering the Foster Parent World

I'm getting a lot of questions via email and comments about our experience entering into the foster parenting world, and I did want to talk about this. Some people are critical, and think we're nuts (quite possibly), some people want to watch because they want to try this too (cool), some people have been there themselves in some portion of the system - as a worker, parent or child and have a lot to teach us. I wanted to put up a post that tells more about where we are and what we're doing - and also includes an important caveat about what I will and won't be writing about. What I Will And…

Another week of GW News, September 5, 2010

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years 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 September 5, 2010 Chuckles, Geneva, COP16+, Impact Theory, Bryozoans, Alroy, Lee, Pakistan Bottom Line, Environmental Risks, Grumbine, Cook, Lomborg, Input, IAC, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Tanker, Methane, Geopolitics, Cairn, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, Pavlovsk Agricultural Station Food Riot, Rome Meeting, The…

Another Week of GW News, May 17, 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... May 17, 2009 Chuckle, World Ocean Conference, Ocean Circulation, Sol, Climate Project, Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate Impacts, Forests, Corals, Climate Refugees, Wacky Weather, Tornadoes, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts…

Getting at a Tiny Portion of the Truth in Obama's Speech

In 2006 when I first met Julian Darley, author of _High Noon for Natural Gas_ and the founder of the Post-Carbon Institute, the world was excited by then-famous "Jack" oil field find in the Gulf of Mexico. Both of us were watching the way the world was interpreting the data - people were claiming that there might be 10, 12, 15 billion barrels of oil - five miles down underneath the ocean. The media was excited, ignoring the fact that large oil field potential reserves are routinely revised - and almost always downwards. The public and the media, without enough knowledge of oil production…

Climate and Weather: Does your TV weather reporter get it?

You hear, again again, that climate and weather are not the same thing. This has led to assertions such as "you can't attribute a single weather event to climate change." But climate and weather are not distinctly different. Climatologists and meteorologists have made statements like this because people do confuse and conflate current conditions and weather forecasts on one hand with climate systems and climate change observations and modeling on the other. Saying "climate and weather are not the same thing" is a convenient segue into a discussion of how certain conclusions may be invalid…

A Skeptical Look at Aliens

OK, I'm feeling guilty: I'm off at The Amaz!ng Meeting enjoying myself, and totally neglecting the blog readers who aren't lucky enough to be here too. And since I've been getting lots of requests to put the full content of my talk online, I figured…yeah, sure, I can do that. So here you go, all of the slides and what I said about them, mostly, below the fold. Criticize and argue and do your usual. TAM is a tough crowd for me: it's a meeting where the emphasis is always on the space sciences, especially this year with a theme that just crows about astronomy, and I'm a biologist. It doesn't…

A conversation with a Rigvir flack

Over the last two Mondays, I've been writing about an unproven cancer therapy that I hadn't really heard much about before. The cancer treatment is called Rigvir; it is manufactured in Latvia and marketed primarily through a Latvian entity called the International Virotherapy Center (IVC). To recap, Rigvir is an unmodified Echovirus, specifically ECHO-7, that, according to the IVC, seeks out cancer cells, replicates in them, and thus lyses the cancer cells (causes their membranes to break, spilling out the cancer cells contents, thus killing the cell), hence the term "oncolytic virus."…

Birds in the News 88 (v3n15)

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter American redstart, widespread throughout North America, is under threat from climate change and future land-use changes. Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [larger] Birds in Science Scientists in China revealed that they found a giant bird whose fossilized bones measure 8 meters (26 feet) in length, 5 meters (16 feet) tall and which weighed 1,400 kilograms (3,000 pounds) and lived 85 million years ago. The fossil was uncovered in the Erlian Basin of northern China's Inner Mongolia, said Xu Xing, a paleontologist at…

Antivaccine legislators are at it again

Here we go again. The "Holy Grail" (well, a "holy grail") of the antivaccine movement is to have a "vaccinated versus unvaccinated" study performed, or, as it's frequently abbreviated a "vaxed verus unvaxed" study. They believe that such a study will confirm their fixed belief that vaccines are the root of nearly all health issues children suffer today, particularly autism and autism spectrum disorders. In particular, they believe that a "vaxed versus unvaxed" study would demonstrate once and for all that vaccines are the cause of the "autism epidemic." Hilariously, a few years back, the…

The Food Babe and Rob Schneider: When companies choose poorly

It’s been a bad week for celebrity quacks; that is, after starting out looking as though it would be a good week. For example, as I discussed a couple of days ago, contender for the title of world’s most brain dead antivaccine conspiracy theorist, washed up comedian Rob Schneider, having somehow managed to land a gig resurrecting his 20 year old “Richmeister” character (a.k.a. the “Makin’ Copies Guy”) in the service of an ad campaign for State Farm Insurance, found his ad dropped like the proverbial Ebola-laced bedding when State Farm was made aware of Schneider’s virulently antivaccine…

Japan Nuclear Disaster Update 33: Fukushima is as interesting as it's ever been

Things at Fukushima are about as interesting as they've ever been. We want to talk about specific problems at the reactor site, with radioactive material, cooling systems, etc. but first a few words about things happening more broadly, beginning with the largest and work towards the smallest scale. Everything we discuss here is based on the material provided in "Ana's Feed" below. There, you will find detailed notes from media and other sources since our last posting, and links. (See here for all of our postings on Fukushima.) Globally, it is interesting and disconcerting that Japan…

Torturing rats in the name of acupuncture pseudoscience

Back when I started this blog, I hadn't yet become aware of the phenomenon known as quackademic medicine. This phenomenon, as you recall, is the infiltration of academic medical institutions that should be bastions of science- and evidence-based medicine by outright quackery. In quackademic medicine, we see Very Respectable Academic Physicians and Scientists wasting their time studying faith healing like healing touch and reiki, prescientific medicine based on primitive vitalism such as traditional Chinese medicine and (of course) acupuncture, and even sympathetic magic like homeopathy. It's…

Alternative medicine for premature ejaculation? Surprise, surprise! It doesn't work.

I must admit that the last couple of weeks have been rather grim here on the old blog. Betweemn Donald Trump's White House spewing , an unfortunate patient embracing quackery, pseudoscience at the VA, and more. So it is that I feel as though it might not be a bad idea to step back for a day, to look into an acupuncture "study" that's been making the rounds in the media. Oddly enough, I remember it showing up a week ago and meant to discuss it then. So I'm glad that I saw a new news story on it in —where else?—The Daily Mail in the form of an article entitled Forget Viagra - acupuncture could…

Bioethics falls for the "tell both sides" trope

I thought that a solid basic understanding of basic and clinical science was a prerequisite to be a bioethicist. AFter all, the prefix "bio" is in the word "bioethicist," which implies to me that bioethicists study the ethics of biology and medicine, which, of course, they do. Some bioethicists are even physicians. After all, to be able to study the ethics of a medical issue, it's rather necessary to understand just what the medical and scientific issues that cause the ethical issues and dilemmas being studied. Unfortunately, as I found out yesterday, it doesn't always work out that way.…

Eric Merola releases a 2016 "update" of his original movie about Stanislaw Burzynski, and the misinformation flows (again)

I feel as though I'm experiencing an acid flashback to 2011, and I've never in my entire life once tried acid—or any mind-altering substance other than booze. What am I talking about? Let's take a trip down memory lane, if you will, back to those halcyon days of—oh—five years ago. That was the time when I first took an interest in the Polish oncologist wannabe named Stanislaw Burzynski. Although I had mentioned him before because he featured prominently in Suzanne Somers' 2009 paean to quackery Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer–And How to Prevent Getting It in the First…