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Another Week of Global Warming News, April 6, 2014

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 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years April 6, 2014 Chuckles, COP20+, GCF, WG2 Report, WG2 Implications, WG2 Reactions WG3, Energiewende, Bottom Line, World Bank, Cook, Shrinkology Fukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather, New Weather GHGs, Aerosols, Volcanoes. Weather…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 420 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 390 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 380 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

ACSH is astroturf, here's why

The American Council on Science and Health recently got some exposure on twitter, then a little too much exposure, after publishing this highly problematic (and hysterically bad) op-ed/infographic on twitter and on their site. This opinion piece, presented as if there is some method or objective analysis, purports to show which are the best and worst science news sites. But this immediately started to fall apart on the most cursory inspection. First of all, notice the x-axis, it's clearly some kind of subjective assessment, and it immediately fails to be credible as the New York Times is…

The revenge of cell phones and cancer strikes back yet again in the never-ending controversy...

NOTE: Orac is on semi-vacation this week, trying very hard to recharge his Tarial cells. Actually, although he is at home, he is spending much of his time in his Sanctum Sanctorum (i.e., his home office) working on an R01 for the February submission cycle. Given that the week between Christmas and New Years Day tends to be pretty boring, both from a blogging and blog traffic standpoint, he's scaling back the new, original stuff and mixing in some "best of" reruns, as well as some more recent stuff that appeared in a different form elsewhere, modified a bit to be more appropriate to this blog…

Another week of GW News, March 13, 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 Overloadis Pattern RecognitionMarch 13, 2011 Chuckles, Abraham et al., Fukushima, The Question, WikiLeaks Bottom Line, Thermodynamics, Cook, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food Riots, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Aerosols, ENSO, State of the Oceans,…

More HIV/AIDs Denial: Lying with Math

Orac sent me a link to some more HIV denialist material, I assume under the assumption that since I'm already being peppered by insults from the denialist crowd, I might as well cover this now. What I'm looking at today is a [paper by Mark Craddock called "HIV: Science by press conference".][craddoc] The paper is purportedly about how the AIDS research community, in cahoots with the media, are deceiving the public about the nature of results of AIDS research. In his words "One of the most disturbing aspects of what passes for AIDS research these days, is the separation between what…

More Than Michael Moore: Research on the Forms, Functions, and Impacts of Documentary Film

Michael Moore is in a class by himself when it comes to generating news attention, advance publicity, and box office for his documentary films. For example, when I was in Canada this past week, I picked up the National Post to read a lead front page story defending capitalism against Michael Moore's latest charges. Tomorrow night, Moore launches his film with a full hour on CNN's Larry King Live. Yet the growing influence of documentary film is much more than Michael Moore. That's the focus of a special issue of the journal Mass Communication & Society that I co-edited with American…

Suzanne Somers' fishy "whole body cancer" scare

I hadn't planned on writing about Suzanne Somers again so soon. After all, I haven't yet received the promotional copy of her book (Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer--And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place) that a most generous reader has sent to me, and I didn't think I'd have a chance until a few days after the book arrived. However, something's been bothering me since yesterday's post, and it's bothering me enough that I think it deserves a followup post of its own. I alluded to it briefly during part of my post, but I really think it's something to be…

The return of Dana Ullman, homeopathic apologist

Oh, no, not again. Respectful Insolenceâ¢ has been invaded over the last few days by a particularly idiotic and clueless homeopath named Sunil Sharma, who's infested the comments of a post about how U.K. homeopaths are complaining about all of us mean skeptics who have the temerity to point out the mind-numbingly obvious about homeopathy, namely that it is based on magical thinking, goes against huge swaths of well-understood science and thus would require some very compelling evidence indeed to be worth being taken seriously by scientists (evidence that homeopaths have been thus far unable…

Tai Chi for osteoarthritis: How exercise is "rebranded" as complementary and alternative medicine

"Complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), now more frequently referred to as "integrative medicine" by its proponents, consists of a hodge-podge of largely unrelated treatments that range from seemingly reasonable (e.g., diet and exercise) to pure quackery (e.g., acupuncture, reiki and other "energy medicine") that CAM proponents are trying furiously to "integrate" as coequals into science-based medicine. They do this because they have fallen under the sway of an ideology that posits a false dichotomy: To practice true "holistic" and "preventative" medicine, physicians and other health…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Activate your DNA!

Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. Besides getting into full R01 grant-writing swing, I went out to dinner last night with a visiting professor and didn't get home until too late for me to grind out one of those 2,000-4,000 word screeds you've come to know and a love. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in November 2006 that, shockingly, as far as I can tell I've never "rerun" before. Remember, if you've been reading less than four…

Another week of GW News, January 30, 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 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsJanuary 30, 2011 Chuckles, COP17, G20, Cablegate, WSF-WEF, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Australia, Pakistan Bottom Line, Subsidies, Thermodynamics, UEF, Cook, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro Corps, Food Prices, Foresight, Food vs. Biofuel, IP Issues, GMOs, Food…

Birds in the News #44

Brown Pelican, Pelecanus occidentalis. Photo by permission. Arthur Morris, Birds as Art. Birds in Science Two University of Canterbury biologists are part of a team whose evolutionarily-informed approach to conservation is aiding the recovery of New Zealand's critically endangered parrot, the kakapo, Strigops habroptilus (pictured). Bruce Robertson and Neil Gemmell, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, are members of a research team that has just had a paper published in the Royal Society of London's prestigious journal Biology Letters. The manuscript outlines how the team, led by…

Conflicts of interest among vaccine advocates: The Law of Contagion

I didn’t think I’d be revisiting this topic again so soon, but damned if Alice Dreger didn’t write something that comes pretty close to demanding that I do so. I tried to resist, but unfortunately could not. Basically, I’m getting really, really tired of Dreger. Why do I say that? It’s because I’m having a harder and harder time not thinking that she has antivaccine proclivities. I don’t want to. I really don’t. But, damn, if she doesn’t keep sounding like a blogger on Age of Autism or The Thinking Moms’ Revolution. The echoes are unmistakeable and appeared again just yesterday. I first…

Another Week of GW News, April 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 Information overload is pattern recognition April 5, 2009 Chuckle, Top Stories:Red River, Bonn, G-20, USNA Climate Summit, GLOBE, Tim DeChristopher, Grumbine, Sunspots Melting Arctic, Wang & Overland, Geopolitics, Methane, Antarctica, Wilkins, Wordie, Polar Conference, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,…

Fixing peer review

I've frequently noted that one of the things most detested by quacks and promoters of pseudoscience is peer review. Creationists hate peer review. HIV/AIDS denialists hate it. Anti-vaccine cranks like those at Age of Autism hate it. Indeed, as blog bud Mark Hoofnagle Mark Hoofnagle, pointed out several years ago, pseudoscientists and cranks of all stripes hate it. There's a reason for that, of course, namely that it's hard to pass peer review if you're peddling pseudoscience, although, unfortunately, with the rise of "integrative medicine," it's nowhere near as difficult as it once was. Be…

Patients lose when they chose naturopaths over real doctors

I write frequently about naturopathy here because, of all the dubious pseudoscientific medical "disciplines" out there, naturopathy (along with chiropractic) has achieved the most "respectability." Indeed, as I like to point out in my own specialty (breast cancer), the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) even admits naturopaths as members. Indeed, the immediate past president of SIO is a naturopath (and, depressingly, faculty at my medical alma mater, the University of Michigan), as was the SIO president in 2014. So entrenched are naturopaths in SIO that they have been prominent co-authors…

The price of antivaccine fanaticism, 2013 edition

That the myth that vaccines cause autism is indeed nothing more than a myth, a phantom, a delusion unsupported by science is no longer in doubt. In fact, it's been many years now since it was last taken seriously by real scientists and physicians, as opposed to crank scientists and physicians, who are still selling the myth. Thanks to them, and a dedicated cadre of antivaccine activists, the myth is like Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, or Freddy Krueger at the end of one of their slasher flicks. The slasher or monster appears to be dead, but we know that he isn't because we know that he'll…

When homeopaths fight back

I love it when my fans notice me. After all, of what use is my having taken so many hours over so many years laying down on a nearly daily basis if my words don't have an impact? Surely I couldn't be so egotistical that I'd do it anyway even if my readership was what it was when I first started out and had not increased to the point where I'm the (alleged) force that I've become in the medical and skeptical blogosphere, would I? Wait, on second thought, don't answer that. In any case, back in the day I'd write my best snarky skeptical deconstruction of some bit of pseudoscience or another and…

Mea culpa! Orac praised the new CDC director for her pro-vaccine views, but missed the quackery in her past.

I have to start this post with a mea culpa, perhaps even a mea maxima culpa. I've been going on and on, in essence gloating about how the antivaccine movement was once again betrayed by Donald Trump. After the betrayal that was the appointment of the ultimate pro-vaccine pharma shill as FDA Commissioner, the second betrayal was the appointment of Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald as the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And, yes, on the surface, Dr. Fitzgerald doesn't appear to be that bad a pick for CDC director. She has a history of being very pro-vaccine during her…

Recent Science-Related Events in the Triangle

Last couple of weeks months were awfully busy, on many fronts, not least finalizing the ScienceOnline2010 program, herding cats almost 100 moderators/presenters to do various stuff (e.g., respond to my e-mails) in a timely manner, and making sure that registration goes smoothly. This is also the time of year when activation energy for doing anything except going to bed to hide under the covers is very high for people suffering from SAD. Thus, you did not see many 'original' posts here lately, I know. But, it's not that I have been totally idle. Apart from teaching my BIO101 lab again, I also…

Repealing motorcycle helmet laws: Making motorcycles even more into donorcycles

It's a seldom mentioned aspect of my professional history that I used to do a lot of trauma surgery in my youth. I did my residency at a program that included a county hospital with a busy trauma program where I saw quite a bit of vehicular carnage and an urban hospital (which has since closed) where I saw a fair amount of what we in the surgery biz call gun and knife club action. During my time as a PhD student, I moonlighted as a flight physician for the local helicopter rescue service, Metro Life Flight, where I took care of patients with everything from cardiac disease requiring transfer…

Another Week of Anthropocene Antics - May 19, 2013

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 May 19, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, Arctic Council, Consensus, Warren 400 ppmv, Ventus Project, Red List, Bottom Line, Cook Fukushima: Note, News Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather, New Weather GHGs, Temperatures, Aerosols,…

Another Week of Climate Instability News, August 11, 2013

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 Instability News Sipping from the Internet Firehose... August 11, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, AGU, NOAA, Potash, Bottom Line, Coal Financing, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Harp Seals, Methane, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, Weather Machine, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather, New…

Dallas Buyers Club-inspired "right to try" laws: Good movies don't make good policy

One of my favorite shows right now is True Detective, an HBO show in which two cops pursue a serial killer over the course of over 16 years. Starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, it's an amazingly creepy show, and McConaughey is amazing at playing his character, Rustin Cohle. I'm sad that the show will be ending this week. Unfortunately, as much as I like Matthew McConaughey as an actor, he is in part responsible for re-inspiring a movement that has the potential to do profound harm to patients and cancer research. That's because his other big role over the last year has been in…

Another Week of GW News, August 26, 2012

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 Overloadis Pattern Recognition August 26, 2012 Chuckles, COP18+, Overshoot Day, The Critical Decade, GCF, Thermodynamics, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes…

Does chemotherapy work or not? The "2% gambit"

"CHEMOTHERAPY KILLS!!!!" I've lost count of how many times I've come across brain-dead statements like the one above, often in all caps on websites resembling that of the Time Cube guy, quite frequently with more than one exclamation point, on the websites of "natural healers," purveyors of "alternative medicine." In fact, if you Google "chemotherapy doesn't work," "chemotherapy is poison," or "chemotherapy kills," you'll get thousands upon thousands of hits. In the case of "chemotherapy kills," Indeed, the top two autofill choices I get on Google for "chemotherapy kills" are "chemotherapy…

Why Creationists Need To Be Creationists

This is a long post from January 23, 2005, trying to tie in Creationism and conservatism through psychology: I always loved animals and always loved science. I read the kids' science and nature books and encyclopedias, as well as adult stuff, like huge volumes about animals e.g., "The Life of Animals" by Alfred Brehm. The best present I ever got was a chemistry set my brother brought me from a trip to Egland. I started learning English when I was five years old. No surprise here, as my parents met at the University, both studying English. It took a while until I was capable of reading…

How Stanislaw Burzynski became Burzynski the Brave Maverick Doctor, part 1

Time really does fly. It's hard to believe that it's been over a week since I gave my big (to me, at least) talk at TAM. It's equally hard to believe that it's been more than a week since I had the honor of being kicked out of Penn Jillette's Private Rock & Roll Bacon & Doughnut Party because back in February I had had the temerity to question whether it was a good idea for Penn & Teller to appear on The Dr. Oz Show. It was a surreal experience, to be sure, to be cussed out publicly (albeit with no mention of my name), kicked out of Penn's private party, and then to have had Penn…

Antivaccine activists rally around "Dr. Bob" Sears. Hilarity ensues.

As regular readers know, last Friday I was quite happy to relay the news that the Medical Board of California had finally acted against a rock star among the antivaccine movement, namely pediatrician “Dr. Bob” Sears. Dr. Sears (or Dr. Bob, as he likes to be called) rocketed to prominence among the vaccine-averse and downright antivaccine by writing a book called The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child. It’s a book that Dr. Bob and his sycophants, toadies, and lackeys portray as being a “middle ground,” complete with an “alternative” vaccine schedule to the one recommended…

Another Week of Global Warming News, June 15, 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 June 15, 2008 Top Stories:UNFCCC in Bonn, Melting Arctic, Antarctica, Permafrost, Solar Cycle, Late Comments Food Crisis, Rome Summit, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, Myanmar, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Corals, Wacky Weather, Tornadoes, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts, US Midwest, China Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings,…

Basics: What is a gene?

I mulled over some of the suggestions in my request for basic topics to cover, and I realized that there is no such thing as a simple concept in biology. Some of the ideas required a lot of background in molecular biology, others demand understanding of the philosophy of science, and what I am interested in is teetering way out at the edge of what we know, where definitions often start to break down. Sorry, I have to give up. Seriously, though, I think that what does exist are simple treatments of complex subjects, so that is what I'm aiming for here: I talk a lot about genes, so let's just…

The Open Laboratory 2008 - all the submissions fit to print

It's midnight! So, the submission form is now closed. Over the past year we have collected hundreds of excellent entries for the anthology - thanks to all who made the submissions. Jennifer Rohn has lined up some star people to judge all the entries, and in the end, we'll have the best 50 (plus a poem and a cartoon/image) published in a book with Lulu.com. We will announce the winners in a couple of weeks or so, but in the meantime, bookmark this post - this is the best of science blogging for the year! And if the winter break is long enough for you to read all of these entries and…

Tell the FDA not to embrace quackery: Write to oppose its proposal on acupuncture and chiropractic for chronic pain

Last week, I wrote about acupuncture, specifically how acupuncturists are unhappy that the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which provides guidelines for recommended treatments for diseases and conditions, does not recommend acupuncture for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis but does recommend arthroscopic washouts and debridement, for which the evidence is weak. My retort was simple: If this is true, the answer is not for NICE to start recommending quackery like acupuncture, but rather for it to stop recommending conventional medical and surgical treatments with…

A science section for the Huffington Post? More like a pseudoscience section! (2010 edition)

Funny how everything old is new again, isn't it? Yes, if there's one thing I've learned over nearly six years of blogging, it's that, sooner or later, everything is recycled, and I do mean everything. At least, that was the thought going through my mind when I came across PZ's discussion of a clueless wonder who appears to be advocating a science section in that cesspit of anti-vaccine quackery and quantum woo, The Huffington Post, whose proclivities for pseudoscience have led its activities to be characterized as a war on medical science. It's actually more than just a war on medical science…

In which Orac defends Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum...

I realize that I'm possibly stepping into proverbial lion's den with this one, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As you may also recall, the arguments and assertions that Chris and Sheril made in their book ruffled more than a few feathers around ScienceBlogs, chief among them the big macher of atheism around here, P.Z. Myers, who really, really didn't like…

Time Travel Story

[More blog entries about fiction, timetravel, sf, sciencefiction; sf, sciencefiction, tidsresor, litteratur, novell] Alvin Gavel just graduated from high school. (He's the son of Aard regular Kai who keeps the bilingual Pointless Anecdotes blog.) This young man has to my knowledge grown up entirely in Sweden. But I would be impressed by his recent time travel story even if English had been his first language. Check it out! Update 12 June: Mr. Gavel informs me that he wrote the story already two years ago. It is the work of a high school freshman. In reply I have told Mr. Gavel that, in my…

Lott's response to Michelle Malkin's op-ed

Lott's responses to Michelle Malkin's op-ed are in a fixed-width font, while my comments on his response are in italics like this. Lott's responses were downloaded on 25 April 2005. Below is Malkin's op-ed with commentary by me (my comments are indented and in italics and start at the bottom of the page with the numbered responses corresponding to the numbers in the supporting document). (Note that two other discussions on this issue have been posted since February 2003 and involve a general discussion of the two other polls that ask about brandishing that have been done…

Finally, the State of Florida acts against Brian Clement and the Hippocrates Health Institute

Every so often, it's good to post some heartening news regarding quackery. After all, after a decade of blogging about this, preceded by five years in the trenches of Usenet battling quackery and Holocaust denial, sometimes it's hard for me not to become depressed. After all, there are times when it really does feel as though we're fighting a hopeless battle for rationality and science against unreason and harmful quackery. It's a battle worth fighting, but I'm not laboring under any delusions that it will be won in my life time or even in the lifetimes of anyone currently alive. The various…

On Civility

Just under a year ago, I quoted and endorsed Stephen Post's argument that lack of civility isn't the problem we face in society, that incivility is a symptom, not an end unto itself. Civility matters, and there are good reasons to urge people to be more civil in their interactions, and to model that behavior ourselves. It's no accident that many uncivil styles of discourse are also informal logical errors. And there's a reason that deliberative venues -Â like the Senate floorÂ - impose a standard of decorum and civility. Uncivil discourse often replaces substantive exchanges about ideas…

On "anti-science" again

There's something about the prefix "anti" that provokes all too many people, even some who consider themselves "skeptics," to clutch at their pearls and feel faint. Antivaccine? Oh, no, you can't say that! They're not "antivaccine"? Who could be so nutty as to be "antivaccine"? Even members of the antivaccine movement don't like the term because even they realize that to be antivaccine is akin to being "anti" Mom, apple pie, and America. So they come up with the defense that they are not "antivaccine" but rather "pro-safe vaccine." They'll come up with silly analogies about how being for…

Another week of GW News, December 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 Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsDecember 5, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16, Kyoto, 4 Degrees+, CableGate, Cable Talk, Pakistan Subsidies, GEE, Weather, The Question, Why, Thermodynamics, Cook, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,…

The spontaneous regression of breast cancer?

I tell ya, I'm on the light blogging schedule for a mere four days, thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the happy invasion of family on Thursday and Friday, and a significant amount of grant writing I've had to deal with on Saturday and Sunday, and somehow I missed not only a study relevant to my field of interest, but the reaction of antiscientific quackery apologists to said study. First, let's look at the reaction, then the study, which reports that as many as 22% of mammographically detected breast cancer may spontaneously regress. First off the block is Dr. Joel Fuhrman: It's…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: You just might be an "altie" if... (2007 edition)

I didn't get back home until late last night; unfortunately there was no time to do a segment of Your Friday Dose of Woo that was up to my standards. Fortunately, there's something that I've been holding in reserve for just such an occasion that fits right in. Long-timers may remember that, near the very beginning of my blog, I did a post entitled What is an altie? It was basically a Jeff Foxworthy-like listing of "You just might be an altie if..." statements that, I think, had a good point. For those of you not familiar with the term "altie," it was coined about three or four years ago on…

Bipolar Disorder: A View From the Inside

Illusions in Lavender was the most difficult story I ever tried to write. I must have set it down a dozen times, driven by the same reluctance I feel writing this post, now. No matter how much research or editing is involved, writing about experiencing a mental illness can never be easy--especially for someone who takes pride in mental abilities. Fifteen years ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Since then, I've learned to recognize the cycles of passion and despair as complex interactions between my body, my brain, and the environment around me. To some degree, I've also learned to…

Acupuncture quackademic medicine infiltrates PLoS ONE

Nearly a month ago, I expressed my dismay and displeasure at the infiltration fo quackademic medicine into what is arguably the premier medical journal in the world, The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in the form of a highly credulous review on the use of acupuncture for low back pain that brought eternal shame on the hallowed pages of a once-great journal. As Mark Crislip put it, trust, once damaged or lost, is very hard to restore, and I definitely lost a lot of trust for the NEJM compared to what I had for it a month ago. Since then, I've been keeping my eyes out for other examples…

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