complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | July 3, 2007One thing that's become obvious to me over the last few years that I've been engaged in dealing with various forms of pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and conspiracy theories is that people who are prone to credulity to one form of pseudoscience, the paranormal, or other crankery tend to be prone to credulity towards multiple forms of crankery. For example, Phillip Johnson, one of the "luminaries" of the "intelligent design" creationism movement is also a full-blown HIV denialist who doesn't accept the science that demonstrates that HIV causes AIDS. Another example is Dr. Lorraine Day,…
oracknows | July 2, 2007About a month ago, I did a facetious throwaway piece about "homeopathic enchantments" being used by one of my favorite comic characters (who, alas, no longer has his own comic series), namely Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme. Given that it was not intended as anything other than a lark, I was rather surprised when it generated a long discussion thread fueled by a homeopath named Dana Ullman, who showed up in the comments and argued with me and several of my best regular commenters. He kept the discussion thread going far longer than the average thread on this blog, provoking annoyance on…
oracknows | June 29, 2007Here's something I've wanted to try for a while now. It'll either be wildly successful and popular, along the lines of You Might Be an Altie If..., or it'll be an utter failure, sinking into oblivion. Which one it ends up being will be up to you, O faithful readers of Your Friday Dose of Woo. The beauty of blogging, of course, is that if it fails next week I can pretend that it never happened and move on to (hopefully) greener pastures, my utter humiliation at publishing crap quickly forgotten, except, of course, living forever on the web.There are two other reasons that today is the perfect…
oracknows | June 28, 2007Yesterday, I did a deconstruction of Generation Rescue's dubious "study" (in reality an automated telephone poll) that claims to show that vaccines increase the rate of autism and other "neurologic diseases."
Now skeptical blogger extraordinaire Prometheus has posted his own excellent deconstruction at his blog A Photon in the Darkness.
I said it before, if I were J. B. Handley, I'd want my money back.
oracknows | June 28, 2007Pity poor Deepak Chopra.
I've abused him on this blog many times, even coining a word ("Choprawoo") for the silliness that emanates from his keyboard every time he posts his inanity to the Huffington Post or his own IntentBlog. I even wrote the only response ever needed to Choprawoo. Of course, he richly deserves the abuse heaped upon him, given his idiotic meanderings in which he misrepresents evolution and neuroscience willy-nilly in his attempt to argue that we are infused by the "consciousness of the universe." It also doesn't help that he's a credulous woo-meister who sells non-evidence-…
oracknows | June 27, 2007J. B. Handley never ceases to amaze me how much he is willing to torture me with his abuses of science, never mind his childish attempts to annoy me by cybersquatting domain names that he thinks I want. So there I was, all set to blog about a rather amusing homeopath that I've come across, when what comes to my attention, whether I want it to or not?
Yes, hot on the heels of its reinvention of itself from being all about mercury all the time to a kinder, gentler entity making an intentionally much more difficult to test and falsify hypothesis that, oh, by the way, lots of other "environmental…
oracknows | June 26, 2007The Autism Omnibus trial continued last week, which was devoted primarily to the government's case. Consequently, there were a variety of real experts, as opposed to the pseudoexperts called by the prosecution last week. With only the occasional hiccup, they are taking serious bites out of the plaintiff's case, as documented on a near daily basis by Autism Diva and Kevin Leitch. Today, I want to focus on Day Eight of the testimony, not so much to beat up on those claiming that vaccines cause autism (although there's plenty of opportunity to apply some much deserved Respectful Insolence⢠to…
oracknows | June 22, 2007The Cheerful Oncologist, noting my recent post about the relapse of Abraham Cherrix's lymphoma in the lung, has done an analysis from--of course!--an oncologist's viewpoint. Given that I don't treat lymphoma, other than doing the occasional lymph node biopsy to diagnose it, his viewpoint is well worth reading.
He quite correctly points out that Abraham's reasoning, where he observes that his tumor has "only" recurred in one place and concludes that what he's doing is working is the fallacy of moderation. He points out that for Hodgkin's lymphoma (and, I personally would add, for all cancer…
oracknows | June 22, 2007In my rigid, Western, scientific way of thinking, things generally have a beginning, a middle, and and end, the arrow of time marching relentlessly onward. However, it occurs to me that this is the very last edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo of its first year. Last June, when I started this, almost on a whim, I had no way of knowing how it would take on such a life of its own. Indeed, I fear that all the woo to which I subject myself on a weekly basis may be having an effect. I'm ceasing to see life as a straight line any more; such rigid thinking no longer suits me.
Instead, like the more…
oracknows | June 21, 2007I've written extensively before about Starchild Abraham Cherrix, the (now) 17-year-old who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease when he was 15 and who, after one course of chemotherapy, refused any further evidence-based medicine in favor of the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy. His refusal led to a big legal battle in Virginia, and the court ultimately (sort of) compromised, letting Abraham go to Mississippi to be treated by a radiation oncologist with taste for alternative medicine named Dr. R. Arnold Smith, who would give him low dose radiation and an unconventional variety of…
oracknows | June 21, 2007Has it really been two years?
Amazingly, it has indeed. On June 16, 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. deposited the biggest, steamingest, drippiest (not to mention stinkiest) turd I had as yet seen in my then young blogging career, specifically an article published simultaneously by both Salon.com and Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. Along with David Kirby's Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Mystery, which had been published a couple of months earlier, RFK, Jr. arguably did more than almost anyone else besides the aforementioned David Kirby to…
oracknows | June 20, 2007I've done my fair share of ranting about Scientology, be it about Tom Cruise's aggressive and arrogant antipsychiatry nuttiness a couple of years ago or the very recent piece I wrote about the disturbing and idiotically conceived anti-psychiatry museum run by the Church of Scientology. The Church of Scientology is, of course, a target-rich environment, given the sheer nuttiness of it all. Indeed, there'd be nothing other than laughter from me if Scientology didn't push a rabid anti-psychiatry pseudoscience in the name of religion and if it didn't go after its critics with the tenacity of a…
oracknows | June 20, 2007Having exhausted myself for the time being on two things that irritate me a lot (namely creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor and the antivaccination pseudoscience being presented as "evidence" that vaccines cause autism at the Autism Omnibus), it's time for a change of pace. For all my tendency to deride certain "alternative medicine" modalities as pseudoscientific nonsense (homeopathy, anyone?), you may have noticed that I tend to take a softer line with acupuncture. No, it's not because I'm a believer. Certainly, I don't buy for a minute that somehow sticking needles in "meridians" in…
oracknows | June 19, 2007While I'm back on the topic of vaccines and autism after a long hiatus, thanks to the Atuism Omnibus, don't know how I missed this article by Sharyl Attkisson, entitled Autism: Why the Debate Rages. I can't recall the last time I saw so many logical fallacies and doggerel packed into an article on an ostensibly "mainstream news" site. In fact, I don't think I've seen such antivax idiocy on a mainstream news site ever, but it's possible that I blocked it out of my mind. I don't have time to do a thorough fisking, but I will hit the main points. Here are the "reasons" that Attkisson lists as…
oracknows | June 19, 2007If you leave aside the problem with the Autism Omnibus trial, which has just entered its second week, that annoys me the most, namely a hypothesis so poorly supported by science and so badly argued by a panoply of nonexperts could make it so far in our legal system and possibly even endanger the Vaccine Injury Compensation System with 4,800 almost certainly frivolous claims that vaccines or the mercury in the thimerosal preservative in vaccines, you're left with the more minor annoyances that this whole trial brings. Foremost among these lesser annoyances, which, let's be frank, do not…
oracknows | June 18, 2007In blogging, there are some topics that I know that I really shouldn't bother with; yet, somehow they suck me in. A number of things can cause that. Perhaps it's a topic that just gets under my skin to the point where I can't hold back a commentary, even when I know that it might be wiser to remain quiet, be it because of the flak that my commentary will bring (antivaccination lunacy, HIV denialists, certain forms of quackery) or because of the threat to my sanity if I allow the irritation of them to go unanswered.
I address this topic because of the latter reason.
I've discussed why…
oracknows | June 16, 2007With the Autism Omnibus trial having finished its first week looking at the first test case of Michelle Cedillo, a very unfortunate girl with multiple medical problems and autism, for whose "vaccine injury" her parents are seeking compensation, it's not surprising that we'd find some slime bubbling up to the surface. First off, we have the ludicrous spectacle of a website that's allegedly supposed to be a source of good information about autism providing a forum for a lawyer named Robert J. Krakow looking to encourage parents of children with autism to sue. Negative comments over his being…
oracknows | June 15, 2007Alright, now they've gone too far.
I can take a lot from woo-meisters. I can watch them claim that water has some sort of "memory" and that diluting a compound to nonexistence somehow seemingly by magic makes it more powerful and chuckle at their silliness. I can listen to them claim that by "alkalinizing your body" you can cure all manner of disease. I can even sit back and be somewhat amused when woo-meisters claim that making wine in a pyramid aligned to true north infuses it with pyramid power and makes it better or when they claim that drinking your own--shall we say?--reproductive…
oracknows | June 14, 2007Things have been very quiet as far as the story of Katie Wernecke, the 14-year-old girl with lymphoma whose parents fought a legal battle with the State of Texas to be able to choose "alternative" therapy involving high dose vitamin C, despite the fact that her conventional therapeutic options had not been exhausted and she still stood a reasonable chance of being saved with chemotherapy and radiation. More recently, we learned the sad news that her cancer had relapsed in a big way, with tumors in her chest. When last we saw her, she had written a heartbreaking story about a dying girl with…
oracknows | June 13, 2007Is your qi weak? Is your aura not glowing as brightly and colorfully as it should? Is your ability to take on ten masked men who conveniently come at you no more than one or two at a time getting shaky, so that you're no longer sure that you can handle more than, say, five evil-doers? Do you feel the need for a "natural energy drink packed with vitamins and exotic botanicals"?
Wait no more! B-movie hack Steven Seagal has your back with his Lightning Bolt energy drink:
Then look no further for the true meaning of life then Master Sensei Seagal's Lightning Bolt Energy Drink!
Lightning Bolt, the…