complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | October 27, 2006Tired of doing Google searches for evidence-based discussions of dubious-sounding medical treatments and finding that the first 100 sites (or, if you're unlucky, the first 1,000 sites) that pop up are nothing more than altie woo, shills selling alternative medicine and supplements, and CureZone or Whale.to wannabes? Here's a useful tool. Le Canard Noir has put together a QuackSafe⢠Search Engine:
The Search Engine will only return matches from sites and blogs that are known to supply reliable information about quackery, quacks, medical fraud and pseudoscience. It is based on the newly…
oracknows | October 27, 2006No, I'm not talking about "Iron Justice," a guy who regularly posts to misc.health.alternative and seems obsessed with iron metabolism as the be-all and end-all of health and disease, with a particular affinity for iron overload as the cause of seemingly all disease, although he might make an amusing target at some point in the future. This time, it's something different. This week, as every week since inaugurating Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was sitting back, contemplating what flavor of woo I should have a little fun with. As is often the case, it was hard. No, it wasn't hard because of lack…
oracknows | October 26, 2006The Skeptics' Circle has been hosted in many places and in many forms, but leave it to Kev at Left Brain/Right Brain to bring it to the one place that it's been hosted before.
We're talking Heaven, people.
Naturally, the assembled skeptics were a bit disconcerted by this particular venue, as amusingly recounted by Kev:
It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Persuading a bunch of Skeptics' to affirm their belief in the blood of Jesus in order to attend a conference in Heaven. Admittedly, they didn't look very happy about it, but it worked. Skeptics' in Heaven. Marvellous.
Once the…
oracknows | October 26, 2006You didn't think this one would go by without my commenting on it, did you? Even though Abel and Tara have already ably commented on it, I can't help but jump in because the article echoes one of the common threads of this blog since the very beginning. Besides, as I've said before, just because everyone else has already commented on an article or issue never stopped me from jumping in before (well, almost never, anyway).
The article in question, Ignoring the failures of alternative medicine, is remarkable (to me, at least) because I can't recall any major media outlet like MSNBC daring to…
oracknows | October 25, 2006One problem with getting old is that you start to see bands that you admired in your youth start to betray what you perceived as their ideals. The Baby Boomers were the first to start experiencing the disillusionment that comes with that, and songs from the rock gods of the 1960's have become ubiquitous in ads for everything from clothes to Cadillacs. Of course, bands that I idolized when I was in high school and college are no different. Sometimes, however, something happens to members of such a band that is just plain bizarre.
For example, could you believe that a member of The Clash is now…
oracknows | October 24, 2006I'm with Kevin, M.D. on this one. Not giving required vaccinations is akin to child neglect:
CHICAGO - State laws that make it easy for children to skip school-required vaccinations may be contributing to whooping cough outbreaks around the country, a study suggests.
All states allow children to be exempted from school immunization requirements for medical reasons -- because they might have a bad reaction, for example, or have weak immune systems -- and 48 states allow exemptions for personal or religious beliefs.
To get non-medical exemptions, some states require documentation, notarized…
oracknows | October 20, 2006I had considered putting Your Friday Dose of Woo on hiatus this week. It seemed rather superfluous. After all, for whatever reason, whatever confluence of strangeness, this blog has read like Your Friday Dose of Woo for nearly the entire week. I mean, come on. I started out fisking that über-woo Deepak Chopra on Monday, and then, not satisfied with one deconstruction of Choprawoo, I took him on again on Tuesday! Then, not content that enough woo had been dealt with on the blog this week, for whatever reason, yesterday I decided to write about what is arguably the ultimate in woo (at least in…
oracknows | October 19, 2006Well, this is encouraging to see: A scientific journal publishing an article debunking pseudoscience, in this case the pseudoscience of homeopathy. (Grrrlscientist might object to the use of Hogwarts in the title, in essence comparing homeopathy to the wizardry of Harry Potter's world. So would I, actually. Such a comparison is an insult to Hogwarts.) In any case, I thought it'd be a nice little tidbit, a warmup for tomorrow's Your Friday Dose of Woo, if you will, to discuss it briefly.
It starts out with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes:
Do you think I don't understand the hydrostatic…
oracknows | October 13, 2006I tried not to write about the altie obsession with "detoxification" again. Really, I did. It gets repetitive, and I don't want Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) to become to repetitive. Of course, a certain amount of repetitiveness is unavoidable, given that there are only a few major themes running through medical woo. First, there's the belief that "toxins" (rarely specified and almost never with any hard evidence linking them to any specific diseases) are causing disease and that you--yes, you!--need to be "detoxified," whether this "detoxification" is supposedly accomplished through enemas…
oracknows | October 11, 2006One of the favorite gambits that alternative medicine mavens like to use to defend their favorite remedies when a skeptic starts asking uncomfortably pointed and specific questions their scientific and evidentiary basis is to accuse said skeptic of being "in the pocket of big pharma." Indeed, I've written before of the "pharma shill gambit," where alties accuse skeptics of being nothing more than shills for the pharmaceutical industry (to which I always respond that it would be a dream come true to be paid for doing nothing more than posting skepticism about non-evidence-based medicine to a…
oracknows | October 10, 2006It figures.
After posting yesterday about whose responsibility it is when a cancer patient rejects evidence-based effective treatments in favor of quackery and then progresses, I would have to be made aware of an update in the case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix.
Ever since Cherrix's story first rose to national prominence a few months ago, I've been periodically blogging about it. Cherrix, as you may recall, is the the teenager diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma late last year who underwent chemotherapy, went into remission, and then relapsed a few months ago. At that point, he refused to…
oracknows | October 9, 2006One of the more onerous duties I have as faculty at our cancer center is to "show the flag" at our various affiliates by attending their tumor boards. I say "onerous" not so much because the tumor boards themselves are onerous but rather because traveling to them cuts into my already limited time for research given that these tumor boards are always scheduled on days on which I don't have to be in clinic or the operating room. One of our affiliates is nearly an hour and a half away, and many of them are close to an hour away. When you add up travel time and the tumor board, that's easily more…
oracknows | September 29, 2006Earlier this week, I thought that I had identified this week's woo target. I told myself that this was it, that this was the one for this week. I even started writing it the other day, because, as much as I try to get this thing done early, somehow I always seem to be writing it at 11 PM Thursday nights. I thought this week would be different.
I was mistaken.
The reason that I was wrong was because I came across a link that was so amusing, so full of outrageously concentrated woo, that I just couldn't restrain myself from throwing my old topic to the wayside (well, not exactly; I can always…
oracknows | September 28, 2006If you think I'm hardcore when it comes to my disgust at antivaccination advocates like Dawn Winkler, you should check out House, M.D.:
[House walks away. Cut to the clinic and House is in an exam room with a young mother and her baby.]
Young Mother: No formula, just mommy's healthy natural breast milk.
House: Yummy.
Young Mother: Her whole face just got swollen like this overnight.
House: Mmhmm. No fever, glands normal, missing her vaccination dates.
Young Mother: We're not vaccinating.
Young Mother: [Takes a toy frog and starts to make frog sounds] Gribbit, gribbit, gribbit. [Giggles]
[Baby…
oracknows | September 28, 2006It was a late night in the O.R. last night; so I didn't get to spend my usual quality blogging time. However, it occurred to me. In honor of being called a "pharma moron" on Whale.to, coupled with all the antivaccination lunacy that's been infesting the comments of this blog, only to be tirelessly countered by certain regulars here, I thought I'd repost a blast from the past that I somehow missed reposting when I was on vacation last month. Yes, it's my piece about the "pharma shill" gambit. It appeared originally on August 11, 2005. I think its reappearance now is particularly appropriate,…
oracknows | September 26, 2006First, it was HIV/AIDS "skeptic" Celia Farber referring to me as "low rent riff-raff." I was so honored by that particular accolade that I had a smile on my face the rest of the day after I discovered it.
Fortunately for me, that's not the end of the accolades.
Thanks to my posts about Dawn Winkler, the antivaccination activist who is running for Governor of Colorado, I've been mentioned on Whale.to as "the pharma moron"!
It's really good to know that my work here is not going unrewarded. I'll have to be careful, or I might get a swelled head. OK, as a surgeon, by definition I already have a…
oracknows | September 25, 2006After the three posts that I recently did about vaccination have garnered well over 250 comments between the three of them (and still counting), I thought it might be time to switch topics. As important as they are, I don't want this blog to become all vaccines all the time. (After all, look what happened to the blog SupportVaccination.org. It's a long story that I'll have to tell you sometime; but suffice it to say that the blog no longer exists.) Quite frankly, seeing the same old fallacies being repeated over and over again by antivaxers does get tiresome after a while. After all, how many…
oracknows | September 23, 2006Holy crap.
I suspected that my two posts about Dawn Winkler, the antivaccination activist running for Governor of Colorado on the Libertarian ticket, might generate some comments and attract some of Dawn's fellow antivaxers to the comments. Little did I suspect just how many, or how hysterical they would become. Because yesterday was a travel day for me, I didn't see many of them until just now, and, even having had a fair amount of experience with the irrationality of many antivaxers, even I was a bit taken aback.
I suppose I shouldn't have been.
One statement, I think, embodies the main…
oracknows | September 22, 2006With all the vaccination "skeptics" who've crawled out of the woodwork over the last couple of days in response to my two posts about Dawn Winkler, the Libertarian candidate for the Governor of Colorado who happens to be a rabid antivaccination activist, not to mention totally clueless and nasty about autistic children (and who even showed up to play the faux amusement bit on my blog), I briefly contemplated antivaccination woo as this week's topic. It would have fit well thematically and flowed naturally from previous posts and dicussion on the matter. After all, there is an incredible…