Bioethics
oracknows | July 8, 2012One major point I've tried to make over the last few years is that the so-called "individualization" or "personalization" of treatments claimed by practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) is not "individualization" at all, but rather a sham that appears superficially like individualization but in reality is not. I say that because the "individualization" promoted by CAM practitioners is not based on science and clinical trials. Another point I've been trying to make is that the true "individualization" of treatments will require science, and it will not be easy. In fact…
oracknows | May 31, 2012I've pointed out before that pover the last couple of years I've become a bit of a fan of old time radio, having discovered Radio Classics on Sirius XM Radio. I don’t remember how I discovered it, but I rapidly became hooked on shows like Suspense, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, The Whistler, Gunsmoke, Dragnet, The Six Shooter, and The Adventures of Sam Spade (the Howard Duff episodes, of course). Then, of course, there's The Story of Dr. Kildare. This particular radio show stared Lew Ayres as Dr. Kildare and Lionel Barrymore as the irascible Dr. Leonard Gillespie (the latter of whom was…
oracknows | May 2, 2012Over the years that this blog has been in existence, beginning very early on, there has been one overarching theme. That theme is that the best medicine is science-based medicine. Sure, we could quibble about how that was originally defined, and I used to be more of a booster of evidence-based medicine until its blind spot with respect to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM). That blind spot, as I've explained time and time again, both here and elsewhere at my not-so-super-secret other blogging location under my real name, that blind spot is prior…
oracknows | April 30, 2012I realize I repeat this a lot, but it bears repeating a lot. Vaccines are, without a doubt, one of the greatest advances in health care devised by the human mind. Arguably, vaccination campaigns have saved more lives and prevented more suffering and death than pretty much any other medical preventative intervention ever invented. I realize that I tick off antivaccinationists when I say that, but I don't care. Actually, I do care. I kind of like ticking off antivaccinationists using science. You didn't think I've been blogging for seven years purely out of a sense of duty to humanity, science…
oracknows | April 18, 2012I 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.…
oracknows | March 12, 2012"Patient-centered care."
It's the new buzzword in patient care. Personally, I find the term mor ethan a little Orwellian in that it can mean so many things. Basically, it's a lot like Humpty Dumpty when he says to Alice, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." So it is with "patient-centered care." It's such a wonderfully--shall we say?--flexible term. That's why I took more than a little interest a week and a half ago when I picked up the New England Journal of Medicine and saw in the Perspective section three articles about "patient-centered"…
oracknows | December 21, 2011I've made no secret of my opinion of the animal rights movement, in particular Jerry Vlasak, a trauma surgeon who has openly advocated the murder of researchers who use animals while--wink, wink, nudge, nudge--denying that he's advocating anything. Another animal rights activist who is equally despicable is Stephen Best, who is affiliated with the even more despicable Camille Marino of the odious Negotiation Is Over, which has recently taken to targeting for harassment students interested in biomedical research who have worked with animals. NIO put this strategy into action, too, by targeting…
oracknows | November 28, 2011I've been thinking about the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. You remember the Holy Hand Grenade, don't you? It was in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where a cleric goes on and on about how "three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three."
Yesterday, I counted two and am now proceeding to three.
I figured that, after spending two posts on how Burzynski's minions and shills (in particular a man named Marc Stephens) have been making baseless legal threats…
oracknows | November 27, 2011Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, I was simultaneously alarmed and amused at how someone named Marc Stephens, who claims (although presents no evidence for his claim) that he represents the rogue physician and "researcher" Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, had taken to threatening skeptical bloggers who criticize Dr. Burzynski's highly dubious cancer therapy, a therapy Burzynski dubbed "antineoplastons." In particular, Mr. Stephens threatened a blogger by the name of Andy Lewis, whose nom de blog is Le Canard Noir and whose blog and website, The Quackometer, I've followed for years now. As a…
oracknows | September 9, 2011ORAC NOTE: Work kept me out late last night going out to dinner with a visiting professor. Fortunately, it was actually pretty fun. Unfortunately, it kept me from cooking up a heapin' helpin' of the Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, that my readers crave. So instead, here's a repost from elsewhere. I didn't think I could use it because the deadline for the survey I discuss was originally September 1. Fortunately, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) extended the deadline to September 16, making this post relevant for exactly one more week. Enjoy! And go…
oracknows | August 18, 2011It's always frightening when lawyers delve into the realm of medicine. It's even worse when pre-law students and political science majors do the same.
Such was the thought running through my mind when I came across the most recent issue of the Yale Journal of Medicine & Law. The result is what I would most accurately characterize as--shall we say?--uneven. Even though the authors try to don the mantle of skepticism, for the most part they fail. Perhaps the best example of this failure is this particular article entitled Chiropractic Medicine: "Quackery's" Struggle for Fair Practice.…
oracknows | August 5, 2011I admire Brian Deer. I really do. He's put up with incredible amounts of abuse and gone to amazing lengths to unmask the vaccine quack Andrew Wakefield, the man whose fraudulent case series published in The Lancet thirteen years ago launched a thousand quack autism remedies and, worst of all, contributed to a scare over the MMR vaccine that is only now beginning to abate. Yes, Andrew Wakefield produced a paper that implied (although Wakefield was very careful not to say explicitly) that the MMR vaccine caused an entity that later became known as "autistic enterocolitis" and later implied that…
oracknows | July 6, 2011What did the poor Haitians ever do to deserve this?
Think about it. A year and a half ago, they suffered through an enormous earthquake that will take them decades, maybe even a lifetime, to recover from fully; that is, if they ever do recover from it fully. Since then, they've received massive amounts of international aid, which is good. What's not so good is that, along with that aid have come a bunch of quacks. I first noticed the incursion of the quackiest of quacks, namely homeopaths, into Haiti only a couple of weeks after the quake. This group of homeopaths was patterned after the…
cagapakis | June 10, 2011I got a long email from one of the authors of the skull measuring study and I want to make some clarifications to my previous post. It seems that I was not as clear and thorough as I could have been in my argument.
First, my sincere apologies to all physical anthropologists and other researchers who routinely measure skulls that I may have offended with my off-hand comments. I did not intend to cast doubt on a whole field, and I am aware that there are lots of reasons to look at skulls besides comparing cranial capacity of different races, many of them very valuable to medicine and…
cagapakis | June 9, 2011
It's not every day that you read about measuring skulls in the contemporary scientific literature. It's kind of a quaintly old-timey, quaintly racist kind of thing to do. But here we are, with a brand new paper about skull measuring in PLoS Biology. Already quite a few blog-words have been written in support of this new paper, which disproves Stephen Jay Gould's assertion in The Mismeasure of Man that George Morton's 1839 skull measurements were fudged intentionally or unintentionally by his racist bias.
I haven't read a lot of Gould, and I'm pretty convinced by the numbers in the paper…
oracknows | May 24, 2011A couple of weeks ago, the anti-vaccine movement took a swing for the fences and, as usual, made a mighty whiff that produced a breeze easily felt in the bleachers. In brief, a crew of anti-vaccine lawyers named headed by Mary Holland, co-author of Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children, published a highly touted (by Generation Rescue and other anti-vaccine groups, that is) "study" claiming to "prove" that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) had actually compensated children for autism.…
oracknows | May 12, 2011Recently, there have been grumblings in the ranks of Orac-philes. All is not entirely well. Or, at least, all is less well than usual. Even more unusual, I feel your pain. I really do. We've been enduring a stretch when the anti-vaccine movement has been unusually busy for an unusually long time, leading vaccines to take over and dominate as the main topic of this blog for more than the last week. This has led not only to my getting tired of the topic, but to some of you apparently becoming tired as well of the sheer burning stupid that only the anti-vaccine movement can lay down with such…
oracknows | March 30, 2011Yesterday, I learned of how animal rights terrorists are targeting college students as the "soft underbelly of the vivisection movement." As an example of their new strategy, these thugs gloated over the "recantation" by a Florida Atlantic University student named Alena Rodriguez, who, because of her e-mail to a Negotiation Is Over editor named Ghazal Tajalli rejecting her request to become involved in an animal rights event, was targeted for a campaign of intimidation, smears, and harassment. As a result, Rodriguez was sufficiently terrified that she basically gave the thugs what they wanted…
oracknows | March 29, 2011I've made no secret of my disdain for self-proclaimed "animal rights" activists, the ones who are more than willing to terrorize scientists doing research to understand disease better and thereby develop better treatments and even cures. None of this means that I am some sort of "animal abuser" (to steal the animal rights jargon) or that I'm cruel and advocate "torturing" animals. There is a difference between animal rights and animal welfare; animal rights activists in essence equate a mouse with a rat with a dog with a pig with a human being. In any case, I've reported how animal rights…
oracknows | March 15, 2011Yesterday, I did a post about ethics in human experimentation. The reason I mention that is because in the comments, a commenter named Paul pointed out an editorial of the sort of variety that we frequently see whenever there is a revelation of misdeeds in human research and a response to that article that is far too mild for the level of idiocy in the editorial. The editorial was written by Justin Goodman of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Appearing in the Sacramento Bee, Goodman's article makes a dubious and typical false analogy for an animal rights activist,…