cancer
oracknows | February 18, 2010What is it with cranks and trying to shut down criticism?
I know, I know. I've written about this before, but this week has been a banner week for a phenomenon that I consider a sine qua non of a crank or a quack, namely an intolerance of criticism. Seemingly, whenever a quack or a crank encounters serious criticism, the first reaction is almost never to try to argue based on facts, reason, and science, but rather to try to silence the person doing the criticizing. The tactics are many and varied, but the end goal is always the same: Suppress the criticism by any means necessary. The very…
terrasig | February 15, 2010I was an angry 14- or 15-year-old in late 1978 or early 1979 - can't recall which year, but definitely angry - walking home on a Sunday night after a dishwasher shift at Grandma's Saucy Apron, a now-defunct Italian restaurant in my hometown where I was working to make money for a Spanish National Honor Society trip to Spain over the upcoming Spring Break.
I turned on 99X (New York City's WXLO-FM) at 9 pm for a new radio show I enjoyed from KXOA in Sacramento, CA, called The Great American Radio Show with Mike Harrison. It was the near-end of the disco era and this album-oriented rock (AOR)…
terrasig | February 10, 2010From Monday's issue of The Press in York, England:
A breast cancer patient from York says she is "disgusted" by a shortage of the drug she and hundreds of other women rely on to reduce the risk of the disease returning.
Mother-of-two Marion Barclay, 45, said the situation became so serious last Friday, she faced the prospect of missing her daily dose of Arimidex tablets.
This story is one of several reports on sporadic, worldwide shortages of Arimidex®, the brand of anastrozole sold by AstraZeneca. Anastrozole is a competitive inhibitor of the cytochrome P450 monooxygenase isozyme known as…
mikethemadbiologist | February 1, 2010Just looked at the White House's proposed HHS budget for 2011, and it seems like the NIH budget will increase from $30.8 billion to $32.1 billion, with over six billion spent on cancer (are you listening Orac?). Other civilian research agencies will be getting bigger increases (Intelligent Designer knows they need it)
I'm feeling hopey and changey!
oracknows | January 24, 2010Mike Adams is confused.
I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn't have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there you go. Speaking of writing an NIH R01, that's exactly what I'm doing now, hence the decreased blogorrhea over the last few days, but sometimes trying to cram a five year project into the 13 pages (one page for specific aims and twelve to describe the project) makes my head hurt so much that reading and…
oracknows | January 20, 2010Last night was grant crunch time to get a truly serviceable draft to my collaborators today as promised, leaving enough time to revise it by the February 5 deadline. That means the blog has to take a hit today, which is a shame, because Joe Mercola and Age of Autism have laid down some idiocy this week that I'm just dying to take down. Oh, well, it'll wait, and if it won't I'm sure there'll be new idiocy to take down (or, if I need a break, some good science to discuss) when I come up for air again. (In the case of Mercola, it's part one of a promised three part series; so waiting until he's…
oracknows | January 14, 2010You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off the ol' Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim
- Jim Croce
I love it when a commenter gives me blogging material.
Let's face it. Blogging is a tough hobby. As much as I do love it so, sometimes I'm at a loss for blogging material. Some would argue that when that happens but not me. Why? Because the blogosphere will provide. At least, it has each and every time that I've ever run into difficulties. Of course, it's even nicer when blogging material is delivered up to me right there in the…
stoat | January 13, 2010Ha ha, there you go, yet another provocative headline that won't really deliver.
From the comments elsewhere (thanks F):
At the rate newspapers keep pushing the boundaries of what nonsense
they will publish, then Einstein's theories will be up for grabs in a
few years. And there is worse than the reporting done on climate science: try
nutrition, or cancer.
which set me to wondering, hence this post. I would agree that the reporting on nutrition or health etc is utterly appalling; Ben Goldacre has made a good career noticing this. My immeadiate reaction to that is: but everyone *knows* it is…
oracknows | January 13, 2010People fear chemotherapy.
Some of this fear is not unreasonable, but a lot of it is a vestige of older days, when chemotherapy was much more unpleasant and even at times horrific. However, contrary to the old alt-med trope of chemotherapy as "pure poison" that makes you sicker than cancer, advances in chemotherapy and supportive management that minimizes nausea and other side effects have made chemotherapy easier to bear for many people. Last year, James Randi underwent surgery and chemotherapy for what sounds like colorectal cancer, although he refers to it as "intestinal" cancer. Be that as…
oracknows | January 13, 2010The Onion or real life recommendations by cancer quacks? You be the judge.
Courageous Man Refuses To Believe He Has Cancer
Sometimes The Onion cuts a little too deeply, but this is not too far from "Secret" territory. Unfortunately for wishful thinking, reality doesn't care what you believe and has a way of asserting itself no matter how hard you wish.
oracknows | December 31, 2009NOTE: 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…
oracknows | December 28, 2009NOTE: 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…
oracknows | December 24, 2009If there's one thing that's irritated the crap out of me ever since I entered the medical field, it's celebrities with more fame than brains or sense touting various health remedies. Of late, three such celebrities have spread more misinformation and quackery than the rest of the second tier combined. Truly, together, they are the Unholy Trinity of Celebrity Quackery.
The first two of them, of course, are that not-so-dynamic duo of anti-vaccine morons, Jenny McCarthy and her much more famous and successful boyfriend Jim Carrey. Having apparently decided that selling "Indigo Child" woo was not…
oracknows | December 22, 2009(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer.)
If there's been one theme running through this blog every since the very beginning, it's the unreliability of testimonials as "evidence" for the success of a cancer treatment. Indeed, if you go back to one of the very first "Orac-length" posts was about that very topic. Indeed, almost exactly five years ago, I analyzed a common type of testimonial for "alternative" cancer therapies and explained why it sounds so convincing to lay people who don't understand cancer biology and treatment. It's a…
oracknows | December 15, 2009There are times when I get really depressed writing this blog. It's not because I don't enjoy it, although like any long term hobby my blogging does occasionally feel like more of an obligation than a hobby. That's only part of the time, though. Most of the time I really do enjoy what I do. That doesn't mean that it doesn't get to me from time to time, however. After all, how much quackery, pseudoscience, and woo can a plastic box of blinking multicolored lights stand on a daily basis for five years. I would submit to you that Orac is made of quite stern stuff indeed. Still, it's depressing…
oracknows | December 14, 2009When the USPSTF issued new guidelines for who should undergo screening mammography, at what ages, and how often, it set off a firestorm of negative reactions. Some of this is not surprising, given that the reevaluation of the evidence for screening mammography led the USPSTF to recommend against its routine use in women between the ages of 40 and 50 who lack strong risk factors for breast cancer; i.e., who are at "average" risk. Add to that the recommendation that screening for women age 50 and older should only be every two years instead of every year plus the recommendation that women…
oracknows | December 9, 2009A while back I wrote about really rethinking how we screen for breast cancer using mammography. Basically, the USPSTF, an independent panel of physicians and health experts that makes nonbinding recommendations for the government on various health issues, reevaluated the evidence for routine screening mammography and concluded that for women at normal risk for breast cancer, mammography before age 50 should not be recommended routinely and should be ordered on an individualized basis, and that routine formalized breast self-examination (BSE) should also not be routinely recommended. In…
oracknows | December 7, 2009The new UPSTF recommended guidelines for screening mammography of healthy women have opened up a can of worms whose consequences have not played out yet, indeed, likely will not play out for a long time. Coming in rapid succession after the announcement of the UPSTF guidelines was a study that suggested that low dose radiation from mammography may put young women with breast cancer-predisposing BRCA mutations at a higher risk for breast cancer. A consequence of the USPSTF recommendations is that politicians have pounced on it as "proof" that President Obama really is preparing death panels…
oracknows | December 5, 2009Bloggers love it when other bloggers cite them to support their arguments. I'm no different, as even a blinking Plexiglass box of lights likes to have its arguments appreciated. I particularly love it when a skeptical blogger uses some small thing I've written to refute particularly egregious nonsense. Unfortunately, there's the flip side to this. There are times when I'd prefer I wasn't cited. No, I'm not talking about anti-vaccinationists like J.B. Handley launching broadsides against me when I hit a particular nerve, various quacks or boosters of quackery going after me when, well, I hit a…
terrasig | December 4, 2009Earlier this week, I saw one of the best treatments of a misinterpreted story that has me thinking about how all news outlets should report in vitro laboratory studies.
Only thing is that it didn't come from a news outlet.
It came instead from a brainwashing site run by those medical socialist types - I am, of course, speaking of the UK National Health Service and their excellent patient education website, NHS Choices.
You may recall reading in the popular dead-tree or online press that investigators from New York Medical College in Valhalla published in British Journal of Urology…