complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | December 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 30, 2005 and is the followup to the first article I did (reposted earlier today). I debated whether to repost…
oracknows | December 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 21, 2005 and is the first of a two-part discussion of what has come to be known as the Al-Bayati Report. Part 2…
oracknows | December 29, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 9, 2006 and seems to fit in with the whole "Friday Dose of Woo" thing; so I'll repost it as such. Enjoy!.
I was…
oracknows | December 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 22, 2005.
A couple of months ago, there was a minor dust-up here regarding an unfortunate autistic boy who died…
oracknows | December 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 5, 2006.
Remember how I said yesterday that I was going to post something today that I had been planning since…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 25, 2006
I hate spammers.
On the scale of Internet scumbags, spammers rank just one notch above pedophiles (barely…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 24, 2006
I was made aware of a most interesting study today appearing in the journal Cancer, which is the official…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 21, 2006.
I know I'm a bit of a stickler, a curmudgeon, if you will, when it comes to medicine. Call me crazy, but…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on July 20, 2005.
Today in Washington, there will be a march, called (with unintentional irony) the Power of Truth march. Its organizers claim that it will be to "…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) This post originally appeared on December 12, 2004 and could be considered the first "substantive" post that wasn't an introduction that I ever did for this blog. See what you think as far as the evolution of my writing style. And, of course, feel free to chime…
oracknows | December 22, 2006Another week in the can.
It's been an eventful one, with prizes won, memories revived, and a couple of pesky Holocaust deniers descending to spew their bile. Hard as it is to believe, the year's almost over and the holidays are upon us. You're probably like me, tired of the Christmas carols, commercials urging you to buy, buy, buy since late October, coupled with the frenzy of preparing for the season. After all that, Christmas is only four days away. Perhaps, like me, you would like to take a little break. And, as always, I know just the thing.
It's time once again for a little bit of tasty…
oracknows | December 20, 2006Dr. Flea's a guy after my own heart. He's been blogging about vaccines, and now he's getting into specific diseases. He's posted an installment about the vaccine against Haemophilus influenza type B:
The first American children to receive the Hib vaccine are turning 20 years old this year.
Flea wasn't practicing medicine in the pre-Hib era, so I asked an older nurse what office-based Pediatrics was like before the vaccine.
"About once a year, a kid would come in with an ear infection. They'd write him a prescription for antibiotics, then he'd go home and die."
Haemophilus influenzae type b (…
oracknows | December 18, 2006I don't think I could have done it much better, if at all.
Dr. R.W. presents, in FAQ-form, a primer on the difference between woo and conventional medicine, even conventional modalities that are weakly grounded in evidence.
A couple of examples:
Many of mainstream medicine's conventional treatments are not evidence based. Aren't they a form of woo?
No. Although some conventional methods fail to measure up to best evidence they are at least based on known anatomy and physiology. They have some plausibility in the observable biophysical model in contrast to the "vital forces", nebulous "energy…
oracknows | December 16, 2006I must have fallen behind in my blog reading, which led me not to notice that Abel Pharmboy over at Terra Sigillata just celebrated his first blogiversary on Friday. Here's to another successful year of science blogging!
If you want to get a taste of what Abel's about, he just posted two good analyses of articles that appeared in the Journal of Clinical Oncology this month, one about the ethics of dealing with situations when parents choose quackery over efficacious treatment for children with good prognosis cancers and another discussing a review article covering the evidence base for the…
oracknows | December 16, 2006Here's an interesting little tidbit of a study:
Newswise -- Lead chelation therapy -- a chemical treatment to remove lead from the body -- can significantly reduce learning and behavioral problems that result from lead exposure, a Cornell study of young rats finds.
However, in a further finding that has implications for the treatment of autistic children, the researchers say that when rats with no lead in their systems were treated with the lead-removing chemical, they showed declines in their learning and behavior that were similar to the rats that were exposed to lead.
Chelating drugs,…
oracknows | December 15, 2006This week sucked.
OK, it was the last two or three days that sucked, but they were bad enough to ruin the whole week. The only reason my blogging didn't reflect this is because most of the posts over the last couple of days were actually written earlier this week, and the true magnitude of this week's suckitude didn't hit me until yesterday. Suffice it to say that my lab minions have caused me considerable aggravation and angst this week by doing something really, really dumb, a problem whose effect was amplified by the response of a colleague. (That's all I'm going to say about it.) To top…
oracknows | December 14, 2006It appears that I'm even further behind in my reading than Abel Pharmboy, because he pointed me to a couple of articles in an issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology that I haven't even cracked open yet. It's probably still sitting in the pile of journals on my desk that haven't been touched yet because I haven't gotten around to them. The issue contains two articles of interest, but I think I'll only touch on one of them for now because it's highly relevant to my previous posts about Abraham Cherrix, the 16 year old with relapsed Hodgkin's disease and refused additional chemotherapy in…
oracknows | December 13, 2006Believe it or not, I missed my own blogiversary.
It's true. It was two days ago. For some reason, as the date approached I got the idea that it was the 13th, when in fact this blog was born on December 11, 2004 on a dreary Saturday afternoon when, after reading the TIME Magazine story about how 2004 was supposedly the "year of the blog" and, given my long history on Usenet pontificating on various topics, on a whim, I decided that I'd dip my toe into this thing called the blogosphere.
Thus was Respectful Insolence⢠born, and I've never looked back since.
Since then, this thing has grown…
oracknows | December 12, 2006Fellow finalist for a 2006 Weblog Award for Best Medical/Health Issues Blog Flea sure stepped into it the other day. A reader e-mailed him a discussion found on the dreaded Mothering.com discussion boards, you know, the same boards that horrified me with the sheer level of antivaccination wingnuttery and HIV/AIDS denialism routinely supported by the discussants there.
After expressing sympathy for a mother's loss of a child, he then goes on to show why it was not, as the mother claimed in the discussion boards, the vaccine that caused her child's death:
What follows is a very sad story of a…
oracknows | December 11, 2006Via The Millenium Project, I've learned that some of the "Dummy" books may be living up to their names a bit too literally:
I almost didn't believe it when I was told that Understanding Autism for Dummies contains advice about how chelation might be a useful treatment for autism, so I used Amazon's "search inside the book" feature and there it was. Perhaps the authors could get a testimonial for the next edition from Abubakar Tariq Nadama. Oh that's right, Abubakar can't give testimonials because he's dead.
Understanding Autism for Dummies, indeed. Peter Bowditch is right. It's all there, if…