complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | June 12, 2007I normally like Crooks and Liars.
However, this time around, while blogging about the Autism Omnibus, Nicole let me down. Saying that "I don't pretend to have any special medical knowledge; so I will link both sides of the thimerosal debate," she then linked to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s totally dishonest fearmongering piece of crap from two years ago and Arthur Allen's voice of reason.
This is the sort of lack of critical thinking that comes from "presenting both sides of a debate" as though they are roughly equivalent when they are not. It's like the press presenting creationist arguments…
oracknows | June 12, 2007The first day's testimony for the Autism Omnibus has been posted, and Autism Diva has the scoop.
I haven't had a chance to peruse the PDF file of the testimony, but what the Diva reports is plenty damning. Maybe I was wrong to be so pessimistic in my earlier post. Dr. H. Vasken Aposhian's testimony is even lamer than my post suggested. On the other hand, the emotionalism in this trial still worries me, as does the uncritical press coverage concentrating on the plaintiffs' "feelings" and only mentioning in a single sentence or two, down near the end of the article or report, that--oh, by the…
oracknows | June 12, 2007The Autism Omnibus is now officially under way, having begun with the first test case, that of Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Omnibus proceeding is the culmination of the legal cases brought to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program by nearly 5,000 families who "feel" that their children's autism was in fact caused by vaccines. Most, but not all, of the plaintiffs blame the mercury in the thimerosal in childhood vaccines, despite there being no good evidence to support such a link, so much so that both David Kirby, whose book Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and…
oracknows | June 10, 2007While reading through a mailing list I belong to, I came across a link that demonstrates that alternative medicine has been ingrained in popular culture since at least the 1920's and 1930's. Indeed, I never realized that that icon of flappers, Betty Boop, practiced homeopathy. Don't believe me? Well, here's incontrovertible evidence in the form of a short called Betty Boop, M.D. released in 1932 and perhaps the most bizarre Boop short I've ever seen (particularly the last shot, which makes me wonder if acid had actually been invented six years before it was supposedly discovered). Basically,…
oracknows | June 8, 2007As we continue our countdown to having reached one full year of woo (namely, the one year anniversary of Your Friday Dose of Woo), it's occurred to me that there's one form of woo that I've dealt with before, but haven't revisited. It's a bit of woo that's so monumentally silly that it's hard to believe that anyone can take it seriously, although I will admit up front that it is not quite as silly as homeopathy. It's close though. I'm talking, of course, about pH woo, the concept that pretty much every disease (or at least a whole heck of a lot of them) is caused by alterations in your blood…
oracknows | June 5, 2007Somehow this one passed under my radar four years ago. However, the there's a reason for this. First, I wasn't blogging then and thus wasn't paying as close attention to alternative medicine. Also, apparently, the State of Oregon didn't know about it until 16 months after the fact, which was still before I started blogging. In any case, behold the sad case of Sandy Boylan:
Sandy Boylan was a contagiously cheerful woman whose hobby was handing out bouquets of homegrown flowers. But in the summer of 2003, she was scared.
The 53-year-old B&B owner from Dallas, Ore., had been told by her…
oracknows | June 5, 2007One of the common refrains you'll hear from alties about "conventional" medicine is that it's a business, that it's all about money. Never mind that, for instance, it's not uncommon for primary care doctors like family practice and pediatricians to net well under $100,000 a year and that many physicians are struggling to maintain their practices, squeezed between lower reimbursements and higher office expenses. Don't get me wrong; I'm not claiming that most doctors aren't making a comfortable living. Most are. Some even do quite well, particularly procedure-intensive specialties, although the…
oracknows | June 4, 2007It was a nondescript room, a board room much like board rooms found in corporate offices across the length and breadth of the U.S., or even around the world. There was the tasteful built-in wood bookshelves loaded with books and journals, for instance. Given the nature of this company, the journals included titles such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Pharmacology, and other scientific titles, and the textbooks included Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, among other weighty tomes. Lining the walls were pictures of men in either suits or lab coats, the…
oracknows | June 2, 2007Those who still desperately cling to the concept that mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism have been known to write some really stupid stuff trying to justify their position or attack someone else's rebuttal of the whole "hypothesis." This week has produced a bumper crop of such fallacy-laden "defenses" of the thimerosal gravy train--I mean, hypothesis--that two of them are worth a brief mention.
Beware, though: The stupid, it burns.
First up is a guy named Mike Wagnitz, who bills himself as having "over 20 years experience evaluating materials for toxic metals" and currently…
oracknows | June 1, 2007Let's face it, energy woo can get boring. It's always "resonance this" and "vibration that," to the point that it all starts to sound the same. Such is the reason that I've become somewhat reluctant to take on more energy woo for Your Friday Dose of Woo. It takes a truly bizarre bit of energy woo to get me interested anymore, and this has me worried that either (1) I'm running out of woo (probably not a problem, as the Woo Folder is still pretty full) or (2) I need to diversify the woo, so to speak. This brings me to a little housekeeping about Your Friday Dose of Woo. It occurs to me that it…
oracknows | May 31, 2007I've been a bit remiss when it comes to writing about the lunacy in which it is claimed that vaccines cause autism, allegedly due to the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was in most childhood vaccines until the end of 2002, when it was removed from all but flu vaccines. It turns out that the class action suit by parents who think that vaccines caused their children's autism will be going to court in June. Hearings for this suit, known as the Autism Omnibus, will mark a new phase in the pseudoscientific pursuit of "compensation" for nonexistent "vaccine injuries." Even though…
oracknows | May 30, 2007I love it.
You see I noticed an old "friend," the Herbinator, making this comment about me regarding dichloroacetate:
I was listening to CBC Radio - the Current, as is my want, and there was a show on about DCA, or Dichloroacetic acid. DCA is a molecule so simple and cheap to make that drug companies are unable to patent it ... so they simply pass on researching it. Some say that DCA is a most excellent and effective cancer treatment.
I have to confess that I had never heard of DCA before. And so I perked an ear toward listening to the radio show as simplicity itself and uppity people…
oracknows | May 29, 2007Last fall, I and quite a few other bloggers wrote about the Tripoli Six. These are six foreign medical workers arrested for allegedly intentionally infecting over 400 children with HIV in a Libyan hospital and, thanks to the ignorant hysteria whipped up against them and the need of the Libyan government to find scapegoats for unhygienic conditions in the hospital, sentenced to death by firing squad, despite allegations that they were tortured while in a Libyan prison to extract "confessions."
Now, five months after their being sentenced to death, the international dance by which Bulgaria and…
oracknows | May 25, 2007One of the banes of a physician's existence is not so much keeping up with changes in how medicine is practiced, studying new treatments, and following the medical literature. After all, that comes with the territory; it's part of the job. Failure to keep up is to become increasingly ineffective and even to risk malpractice lawsuits. No, what's a major bane is to document that you've kept up. In other words, it's to get enough continuing medical education (CME) credits to be able to renew your medical license. In my state, I have to get 100 CME credits in two years in order to renew my…
oracknows | May 24, 2007A number of readers have mailed me links to this story, and, yes, it is right up my alley. In reading it, I fear that it's a vision of the future for two young cancer patients who are very unlikely to survive their cancers because their parents eschewed evidence-based medicine in favor of woo, Starchild Abraham Cherrix and Katie Wernecke, both of whom had relapsed when last I discussed them. The case is one with which I had not been familiar, namely that of Noah Maxin, of Canton, OH:
CANTON No one in the courtroom nearly five years ago wanted this day to come. Not Noah Maxin's parents. Not…
oracknows | May 22, 2007While I'm on the topic of alternative medicine and NCCAM again, I've said on many occasions that I reject the distinction between evidence-based medicine and "alternative medicine" as a false dichotomy. To me, the only dichotomy that matters is between medicine that has high quality scientific evidence showing that it works and medicine that does not, a category that includes plausible treatments that might work but have not yet been shown to work and treatments, implausible treatments with little or no evidence of efficacy (a category that includes the vast majority of what is lumped…
oracknows | May 22, 2007I've complained on multiple occasions about the infiltration of non-evidence-based "medicine" (a.k.a. woo) into every level of medicine in the U.S.. Worst of all, it's infiltrating medical education in a big way, starting with the pro-woo activism of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), to various educational programs in various medical schools, to even the mandatory medical curriculum in at least one prestigious medical school. This is more than just teaching what various "alternative medical" therapies are, so that new physicians know what their patients are referring to or…
oracknows | May 20, 2007It would appear that I must respectfully disagree (or be Respectfully Insolent, if you will) with fellow comic fan Scott over at Polite Dissent.
Two of my all-time favorite comics are Fantastic Four and (believe it or not, given my present day disdain for woo) Doctor Strange. Doctor Stephen Strange, for those of you not familiar with him, started out as an incredibly arrogant and greedy neurosurgeon who was involved in an auto accident in which he suffered nerve damage to his hands that impaired the fine motor control to the point where, while he could function normally in every day life, he…
oracknows | May 17, 2007Dr. R. W. asks (and answers) the question, pointing out in detail how:
Promoters of unscientific claims often reject ordinary scientific standards for experimental design and evidence.
Even government funded CAM research is troubled with serious methodologic flaws.
Research on complementary and alternative methods is conducted without regard to biologic plausibility.
The proponents and funders of alternative medicine research do not accept negative results.
Government oversight is biased in favor of complementary and alternative medicine.
He's right on all points, although he forgot that…
oracknows | May 17, 2007
When I learned of this, I had been highly tempted trot out everybody's favorite undead Führer for a little fun with the Church of Scientology's latest antics. Indeed, when you find out what I'm about to discuss, you'll see why it was a candidate for the loving chomp of his rotting jaws. Heck, I even started to do the whole Hitler zombie schtick that regular readers all know and some even love (or at least tolerate--well, most of you, anyway). As I typed away, though, I was having more and more trouble. My conscience was feeling more and more troubled. After all, I've lovingly crafted…