complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | October 15, 2007Today is a very sad day in the autism blogosphere. The news I am going to discuss saddens me and should sadden anyone concerned with autism, particularly in combating the antivaccination hysteria and the outright quackery that flows from it promulgated by so many these days, from J. B. Handley to Jenny McCarthy, who couldn't be more different other than their being twits.
One of the longest-running and best autism blogs, Left Brain, Right Brain, is closing.
It would be one thing if the trials and tribulations of everyday life had led Kev to make this decision, as they do for so many other…
oracknows | October 14, 2007About a week ago, I posted about a truly execrably credulous article on alternative medicine published at CNN.com, which basically took a panel of true believers and asked them which five alternative medicine modalities had the best evidence to show that they "work."
Now, Steve Novella weighs in. His key point, with which I agree, is that "alternative" medicine advocates (or "complementary and alternative medicine," or CAM) have been wildly successful in framing their favored woo as being on an equal footing with "conventional" medicine, all the while carving out a double standard that allows…
oracknows | October 13, 2007The Skeptical Surfer informs me of a rather disturbing programming decision by PBS:
I first caught wind of the autism film "Beautiful Son" through the surfing community. Surf filmmaker Don King has an autistic son. Being a filmmaker, Don always has a video camera at hand and has documented his "journey" of discovering that his child has autism. This, along with other footage and interviews, have become a film about autism called "Beautiful Son."
[...]
The film has not yet premiered, but there is enough supporting evidence via a web site and film preview to draw a few conclusions. Let's start…
oracknows | October 12, 2007Woo-meisters will not be pleased. While perusing this week's Skeptics' Circle, I was reminded of something that I had meant to post about a couple of days ago.
I don't know how he did it or where he got it, but somehow he has found the Holy of Holies for woos everywhere. He found The Woo Handbook. In it, he finds the twenty main strategies for dealing with Skeptics. They're pretty much all there: shifting the goalposts, labeling skeptics as "close-minded," introducing quantum mechanics, and appeals to ignorance, along with #18, the technique of woos that probably annoys me the most (at least…
oracknows | October 12, 2007
Regular readers of this blog are probably aware of my general opinion about Reiki and other "energy healing" modalities. In short, they're woo, pure and simple. Consequently, one might reasonably ask why I've never featured the woo that is Reiki in Your Friday Dose of Woo. There's a simple reason for that.
Basic Reiki is boring.
Really, I mean it. In and of itself, it just doesn't reach the level of sheer ecstatic nuttiness that I like to feature every week. Oh, sure, there's lots of handwaving about "channeling the universal energy" through the healer to augment the life force of the…
oracknows | October 11, 2007One of the biggest complaints from alternative medicine practitioners is that some vast cabal, presumably made up big pharma, the CDC, the NIH, the AMA, and "conventional" doctors, is "suppressing" alternative medicine. Yes, true believers like, say, Mike Adams will claim that big pharma is going to suppress their free speech about "alternatives" and thus deny you your "heath freedom," which is in reality the freedom of quacks to push quackery without being hassled by pesky things like government agencies requiring that practitioners practice evidence-based medicine.
So what happens when…
oracknows | October 11, 2007I should have guessed.
Leave it to uber-crank (a. k. a. One Crank To Rule Them All) Mike Adams, the "intellect" behind what is perhaps the crankiest website known to humankind (at least when it comes to medicine), NewsTarget.com, to try to slime Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As fellow ScienceBlogger Mark points out, in his "report" Breast Cancer Deception, Adams accomplishes this by characterizing Breast Cancer Awareness month as nothing more than part of a conspiracy by the "male-dominated" cancer industry to keep women down.
I have to admit, in the realm of sheer wingnuttery, I've seldom…
oracknows | October 10, 2007One development that will increasingly pose an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable question for newspapers is the increasing addition of blogs run under the banner of newspapers. I'm not sure if it's cluelessness about the blogosphere leading newspapers to think that they can have bloggers write whatever they want under the newspaper's banner and not have it reflect on their reptuation, but reputable papers have in some cases allowed some seriously credulous people to spread misinformation in a seemingly respectable form.
This thought occurred to me when I was made aware of a blog entry by…
oracknows | October 9, 2007On occasion, I've thought of inaugurating awards for the looniest quackery, alternative medicine, or antivaccination craziness of the year. I was thinking of calling them the Woo Awards, but I've never actually gotten off my lazy posterior to do the work it would take to set up some sort of voting system, and I'm not so sure that a list picked out only by me wouldn't just end up reflecting my personal idiosyncrasies. Be that as it may, with the end of the year fast approaching, if I were going to do it now would be the time to start looking for nominations.
If I were going to give a prize for…
oracknows | October 8, 2007Regular readers know that I've long been dismayed at the increasing infiltration of non-evidence-based "alternative" medical therapies into academic medical centers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). It's gotten such a foothold that it's even showing up in the mandatory medical curriculum in at least one medical school. I've speculated before that academic medical centers probably see alternative medicine as both a marketing ploy to make themselves look more "humanistic" and a new revenue stream, given that most insurance companies won't pay for therapies without solid evidence of efficacy, meaning that…
oracknows | October 7, 2007I've had this story sent to me by a few readers over the weekend, and I think it's worth a brief comment.
I'm basically a child of the 1970s. Although I didn't watch it much, if ever, I remember Charlie's Angels when I was in junior high and high school. Like any adolescent who came of age in the late 1970s, I remember the famous and hot-selling poster of Farrah Fawcett, which graced the bedroom of more than one of my friends, although I never actually owned a copy. A while back, I heard that Fawcett had been successfully treated for anal cancer. Now, I hear from my readers that her anal…
oracknows | October 5, 2007Some readers have been sending me links to this article on CNN.com entitled 5 Alternative Medicine Treatments That Work. Unfortunately, Your Friday Dose of Woo took up the time that normally would have gone into given this article the lovingly Respectfully Insolent⢠treatment that this utterly credulous article so richly deserves and that you, my faithful readers, demand. Fortunately Mark over at denialism.com has taken the time to fisk this one in detail. Does that mean Orac has nothing more to say on this article?
You know the answer to that one. Mark just made it so that I can restrain my…
oracknows | October 5, 2007Over the last 15 months that this regular Friday feature has been in existence, I've come across some real doozies in the world of woo. Who could forget, for example, quantum gyroscopic theories of homeopathy? Or the DNA activation guy? Or the "no plane" conspiracy theory of 9/11? Or a certain disgusting "feedback loop" for curing cancer? A few others stand out from the pack, like Healing Sounds and Dr. Emoto, as rare examples of just the right amount of superficial plausibility married to over-the-top craziness to be memorable.
This week's installment might just be one of these. It is truly…
oracknows | October 4, 2007I've made no secret how much contempt I have for Kevin Trudeau, whom I have likened to David Irving, at least with respect to his respect for the truth. He has made many, many millions of dollars selling books with titles like Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About and its followups, in which he claims that there are "natural" cures for all sorts of diseases that the usual cabal of big pharma, the AMA, and the FDA are keeping away from you--yes, you!--in order to protect the profits of big pharma and the hegemony of us "conventional" physicians. Obviously, Trudeau is a total hack…
oracknows | October 2, 2007Last week, I wrote about an overhyped acupuncture study that purported to show (but didn't, really) that acupuncture is more effective than "conventional" therapy in the treatment of low back pain. This story reverberated through the Internet and blogosphere as "proof" that acupuncture "works" when in reality the study was very weak evidence of any effect due to needles being placed into the skin and only showed that meridians are a meaningless concept (i.e., the finding that sham acupuncture was just as effective "real" acupuncture). If acupuncture does do anything, this study was pretty…
oracknows | October 1, 2007One of the best retorts to the claims of faith healers is the simple question: If faith healing works such miracles, why has there never been a documented case of faith healing regrowing an amputated limb? Now that would be truly miraculous. That would make even a curmudgeonly old skeptic like me sit up an take notice.
Now, a woman named Carole Miller McCleery-Greene is claiming just that; so I had to check it out.
When I came across this Carole's site on a mailing list, I originally filed it away, thinking it would make a good installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo. Then I thought about it.…
oracknows | September 30, 2007I think the title says it all. Perfect!
Whoever wrote the book sure knows her potential readers!
oracknows | September 28, 2007Because if you're going to make health claims and claim to treat patients, you should be held just as accountable as any physician:
A Carson City "anti-aging" doctor has pleaded guilty to malpractice for failing to diagnose an elderly patient with the cancer that ultimately killed him.
It is Dr. Frank Anthony Shallenberger's second discipline by the Nevada Board of Medical Examiners in 12 years.
Shallenberger's plea last week regarding patient David Horton's care came on the heels of the board's dismissal of another family's complaint related to Shallenberger's treatment of their sister,…
oracknows | September 28, 2007
In looking back at all the various bizarre incarnations of woo that I've covered during the last year or so since I started doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was wondering if there was a form of woo that I had not covered yet. Woo seems to come in several forms, such as energy woo, water woo, pH woo, "detoxification" woo, religious woo, and psychic woo, among others, with certain themes that just keep recurring over and over. I'm sure there's enough material there for a Ph.D. thesis on the classification of woo, if some intrepid graduate student were interested. For this week, I was looking…
oracknows | September 27, 2007Damn that Factitian! Now he's gone too far! In hosting the 70th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, he's revealed some of the deepest darkest secrets of the Skeptical Atheistic Darwinist Scientific Conspiracy to Conquer All (SADSCCA), also known as The Conspiracy Factory in some circles. And you'll never believe who the leader of the conspiracy from whom we all take our marching orders is!
I may have to become more insolent and less respectful. After all, our leader has commanded it:
Yes. Put Orac on it. And someone tell him to stop being so respectful, and more insolent. I prefer the insolence…