autism
oracknows | November 23, 2010They call it the Nobel disease.
Linus Pauling is the prototypical example. A brilliant chemist who won two Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, in his later years Pauling became convinced that high dose vitamin C was a highly effective treatment for cancer and the common cold and, expanding upon that, came to believe in the quackery that is orthomolecular medicine. As a result, Pauling's reputation was tainted for all time, and he became known more for his crankery than his successes. Since his death, Pauling's successors have continued to chase his dream with minimal…
oracknows | November 5, 2010As Vaccine Awareness Week, originally proclaimed by Joe Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher to spread pseudoscience about vaccines far and wide and then coopted by me and several other bloggers to counter that pseudoscience, draws to a close, I was wondering what to write about. After all, from my perspective, on the anti-vaccine side Vaccine Awareness Week had been a major fizzle. Joe Mercola had posted a series of nonsensical articles about vaccines, as expected, but Barbara Loe Fisher appeared to have sat this one out, having posted nothing. Well, not quite. More like almost nothing. I noticed…
oracknows | November 4, 2010I may have taken a break yesterday, but that doesn't mean I've abandoned my mission to make this Vaccine Awareness Week (or, more properly, the Anti-vaccine Movement Awareness Week, dedicated to countering the lies of the anti-vaccine movement). Even though it was good to take a day off, the anti-vaccine movement rarely takes a day off, and yesterday was no exception. Indeed, one of the most belligerent anti-vaccinationists of all, the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest anti-vaccine bull of all, decided to show up for the first time in a long time yesterday on his organization's…
oracknows | November 2, 2010One of the great things about having declared Vaccine Awareness Week is that it gives me a convenient excuse to revisit topics and blog posts that I had meant to address but that somehow didn't make the cut the first time around. This is the sort of thing that happens fairly frequently in blogging, where there is far too much woo and idiocy for one blogger to have even a hope of ever addressing it all.
And that's just the anti-vaccine movement.
In any case, if there's one thing about the anti-vaccine movement that I've noticed, it's that its members have a very warped view of both science and…
oracknows | November 1, 2010"Anti-vaccine."
I regularly throw that word around -- and, most of the time, with good reason. Many skeptics and defenders of SBM also throw that word around, again with good reason most of the time. There really is a shocking amount of anti-vaccine sentiment out there. But what does "anti-vaccine" really mean? What is "anti-vaccine"? Who is "anti-vaccine"? Why? What makes them "anti-vaccine"?
Believe it or not, for all the vociferousness with which I routinely go after anti-vaccine loons, I'm actually a relative newcomer to the task of taking on the anti-vaccine movement. Ten years ago, I…
sa smith | October 26, 2010Dear Age of Autism--
Dont ever link to ERV again.
I dunno whether you know this or not, but I get paid per page view. If you link to me, it means my check for the month is tainted with your filth. That makes me want to puke.
There is no point in you linking to me. Neither you, nor your readers, have anything to offer ERV or its readers.
lisa-- What a stupid website. Why are you wasting your life this way. Go do something useful. Start a dry-cleaners or something. At least then you would be contributing to society.
Wow, just...wow--The level of maturity and intelligence posted here is a…
oracknows | October 21, 2010My alma mater has let me down.
As many of you know, I went to the University of Michigan for both my undergraduate degree and for medical school. I still have a fairly strong attachment to the school, which is why I can still be disappointed when its faculty let me down. Unfortunately, it's happened, and this time U. of M. has disappointed by inadvertently providing ammunition for the anti-vaccine movement. I'm referring to a poll released by the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital (which is where I did my pediatrics rotations when I was in medical school). The poll results are being trumpeted…
oracknows | October 18, 2010Posting will probably be very light the next couple of days because I'm at the Lorne Trottier Symposium. Not only have the organizers have packed my day with skeptical and science goodness, but I only have Internet access when I'm back at the hotel, which isn't very much. This is somewhat distressing to me because several readers have sent me a truly bad study implying that (with the press out and out saying that) because investigators couldn't detect signs of cancer in Egyptian mummies there must not have been cancer in pre-industrial times, the further implication being that all cancer is "…
sa smith | October 15, 2010Im totally done with XMRV-->CFS. It appears that scientists have gotten their heads back, and this last slew of testing was officially the death-blow for this hypothesis for me: Theres no XMRV in HIV-1 patients. Three studies now, not to find an association between the two. HIV/AIDS patients get everything and anything, and when they get it, it is pathogenic (even if its no big deal in fully healthy humans). Unless of course, XMRV is, once again the 'exception' to basic biology/immunology/retrovirology.
Can XMRV infect humans? Almost certainly. Does it, and does it cause disease? I…
oracknows | October 12, 2010Although American skeptics might not be familiar with her, Australian skeptics are, sadly, all too well-acquainted with Meryl Dorey. Dorey, in case you're not familiar with her, is the head of the Australian anti-vaccine group with the wonderfully Orwellian name Australian Vaccination Network, which is basically the Australian equivalent of American anti-vaccine groups like National Vaccine Information Center or Generation Rescue or the British anti-vaccine group JABS when it comes to spreading anti-vaccine propaganda far and wide down under. The only difference is that Dorey may be even…
oracknows | October 11, 2010About a week and a half ago, Dr. Bob Sears, he of the "alternative vaccine schedule," appeared on Fox & Friends. Somehow, someway, even though I meant to deconstruct it I never got around to it. Believe it or not, during the interview Dr. Sears stooped to the anti-vaccine idiocy that calls vaccines "unnatural" because they are "injected directly into the bloodstream" (they're not, by the way), and I couldn't let that pass.
But I did.
Fortunately, ScienceMom at Just the Vax has taken it on so that I don't have to anymore.
oracknows | October 10, 2010Over the weekend, I saw a rather fascinating post by Sullivan entitled A Sense of Civil Discourse. The reason I found it so fascinating is because what was quoted in it utterly destroyed my irony meter yet again, leaving it nothing but a molten, gooey mess still bubbling and hissing in my office. Apparently last week, Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted, authors of the distillation of all the craziness that is the blog Age of Autism into book form under the same title, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, did a radio interview on the Leonard Lopate Show. During the…
oracknows | October 8, 2010Around about this time last year, the nation, nay, the world, was in the throes of a frenzy about the H1N1 influenza pandemic. It was also fertile ground for skeptical blogging for two reasons. First, it was a major health-related story. Second, the mass vaccination campaigns for H1N1 that governments thew together hurriedly was a magnet for quacks, cranks, and loons of the anti-vaccine variety. Truly, the craziness came fast and furious, with each new day bringing a new atrocity against science and reason. Indeed, even one of my favorite magazines, The Atlantic, wasn't immune, as…
oracknows | October 6, 2010As I mentioned earlier this morning, I went to get my annual flu vaccine. It's the least I can do to protect myself and to protect the immunosuppressed patients around me in a major cancer center. I was looking forward to cheekily asking the nurse administering the vaccine to make sure mine had thimerosal, but when I got to the part of the clinic where the flu vaccines were being administered I was in for a nasty surprise.
The first indication came when I had to fill out a form similar to last year's form asking me if I had ever had a reaction to egg products or the seasonal influenza vaccine…
oracknows | October 6, 2010It's about time.
My cancer center is finally offering the flu vaccine for its employees, and I'm off to go and get it. I'll be sure to ask for extra thimerosal. Even though Jock Doubleday's challenge seems to have disappeared, I'll still do it in his honor.
This year, I'm particularly proud of my cancer center in that its leadership has made a stand by partnering with other health care institutions in the city and requiring the flu vaccine for employees who directly interact with patients. That means doctors, nurses, support staff, receptionists, pretty much everyone other than the lab rats…
oracknows | September 30, 2010...take a gander at this post by Steve Novella about Gary Kompothecras and Charlie Crist and how they are endangering children's health in Florida by promoting the father-son team of antivaccine pseudoscientists Mark and David Geier, the very same issue I wrote about yesterday.
Fear not. The end is in sight. The logorrheic insolence you know and love (or hate) will soon return. In the meantime, I really need some coffee.
oracknows | September 29, 2010It's grant crunch time, which almost always means that a lot of stuff happens that I don't have time to write about and that the week after I submit it (i.e., next week) usually nothing interesting happens to write about and I'm left posting LOL Cats or something like that. Be that as it may, sometimes something happens that goads me to the point where I have to comment, although reality keeps me from my usual logorrhea. Who knows, maybe that's a good thing.
In any case, yesterday Brandon Thorp (who also works for the JREF) teamed up with Penn Bullock to write a disturbing report on just how…
oracknows | September 22, 2010Sometimes I can't figure anti-vaccine loons out. No, I'm not talking about the pure pseudoscience they lay down on a daily basis. I can sort of get how some of them might cling against all scientific evidence to the idea that somehow vaccines "damaged" their child, along with the blandishments of the army of quacks known as DAN! doctors promising them that, if you just use this diet, this new supplement, this new nostrum, this hyperbaric oxygen, you can have a normal child again. What I can't get is how individuals who, however misguided they are about science, even to the point of laying…
oracknows | September 21, 2010Way, way back in the deepest darkest depths of history, before I entered the Knowledge Room and sold my soul to big pharma to become a pharma blogger (in other words, way back in 2005), my inauguration as a skeptical blogger taking on anti-vaccine misinformation, pseudoscience, and lies occurred in a big way when I referred to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s infamous article Deadly Immunity as flushing Salon.com's credibility down the toilet. That was when I discovered the mercury militia, that subset of the anti-vaccine movement that believes that mercury in the thimerosal preservative that used to…
oracknows | September 17, 2010On the blogging front, I started out this week with a part facetious, part serious, part the highly detailed analysis of a new study of interest that you've come to know and love (or hate). The study was Price et al, and it was yet another nail in the coffin of the scientifically discredited notion that mercury in vaccines causes autism, a notion whose coffin already had so many nails in it that Price et al probably had a hard time finding even a tiny area of virgin wood into which to pound even a tiny nail of a study published in an impact factor one journal, much less the spike that their…