complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | July 21, 2006Alright, I admit it.
I went a little overboard with last week's edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. This feature was intended to be a light-hearted look at whatever particular woo target that catches my fancy on a given week, as opposed to the more serious discussions of alternative medicine I like to do at other times. However, it's a fine line between believing in a bit of strange altie woo and possibly being a disturbed individual, and I fear that last week's targets (the guy who wanted to sell the secrets of Jesus on Ebay and Alex Chiu, who claims to have figured out how humans can be…
oracknows | July 19, 2006I thought this was a joke when a reader e-mailed me about it. I mean, it's just so over-the-top that I had a hard time believing that it was real.
It was (found via MacDailyNews):
The huge rise of autism in Britain is linked to old iPod batteries, mobile phones and other products of the electronic age, a leading scientist claimed this weekend.
Autistic children have been shown to have problems getting rid of toxic metals - and those metals are increasingly polluting the environment, says Dr Richard Lathe.
"Think of iPod batteries, computers, television sets and mobile phones - thousands of…
oracknows | July 14, 2006From The Daily Mail:
British holidaymakers are putting their lives at risk by relying on homeopathy to protect them against malaria, doctors have warned.
The medical experts condemned the practice of prescribing pills and potions made from tree bark, swamp water and rotting plants as 'outrageous quackery' and 'dangerous nonsense'.
Their warning follows an undercover investigation which found that alternative medicine clinics readily sell travellers homeopathic protection against malaria, despite clear Government advice that there is no evidence such treatments work.
It also comes after a…
oracknows | July 13, 2006Over the couple of days or so, a minor flurry of comments have hit the ol' blog. I hate to let commenters dictate the content of my blog, but it's strictly a coincidence that this happens to be a post I had been planning sometime this week anyway and it comes around the same time as the minor altie comment deluge hit the blog. Or maybe it's not such a coincidence, coming as it does in the wake of a court hearing relevant to the case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix. Recent commenters have castigated me, claiming that the Hoxsey treatment is not quackery; asserting that cancer is "not due to a…
oracknows | July 12, 2006Like most bloggers, I suspect, I like to know who's linking to me. Unfortunately, the majority of bloggers appear not to use TrackBacks, and even when they do for some reason the TrackBacks often don't register. Couple that with a level of comment spam that sometimes outnumbered my legitimate TrackBacks by at least 200:1, and you see that TrackBacks aren't a great way of knowing who's linking to you. Consequently, a couple of times a week, I do quick Technorati and Google Blog Searches on the URL of Respectful Insolence to see who happens to be linking to me.
That's how I found this brief…
oracknows | July 10, 2006I had tried to give the Dr. Mark Geier and his son David a rest for a while, as I suspected my readers may have been getting a little tired of my bashing them, no matter how deserved that bashing may have been. After all, they do shoddy science in the service of "proving" that mercury in vaccines causes autism. They concoct dubious IRBs riddled with conflicts of interest to "approve" their research. When the evidence that this is not the case becomes more and more compelling, they add a twist of a claim that many autistic children suffer from "precocious" puberty," which requires treatment…
oracknows | July 7, 2006When I originally conceived of doing a weekly feature entitled "Your Friday Dose of Woo," I did it almost on a whim. Now that I've reached the second week, I've realized that this is going to be harder than I thought. No, it's not that it's hard to find suitable targets. Quite the opposite, in fact. There's just too much woo out there, that it's really hard to choose a suitable subject. I had a hellacious time trying to pick one particular instance of woo that tickled my fancy enough to dedicate a blog post to it.
Of course, I did think about doing a followup to last week's Friday Dose of Woo…
oracknows | July 6, 2006It's that time again, time for the 38th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle.
Thirsty?
Well, LBBP over at Skeptic Rant offers parched skeptics a fine assortment of beverages including Satire Cider, Quack Quencher, Woo Brew, and Creationist Tonic, among others. It's just the cool, refreshing dose of critical thinking to quench that skeptical thirst that's been intensified by the rampant credulity of society in general and the blogosphere in particular.
Drink deep!
And come on back for the 39th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which will be hosted by Mike over at (appropriately enough) Mike's Weekly…
oracknows | July 6, 2006The mercury militia and MMR scaremongers aren't going to like this, not one bit.
What should greet my in box upon my arrival at work after a long Fourth of July weekend, but an alert of a new study of a large population of children in Canada that utterly failed to find an epidemiological link between thimerosal or MMR vaccination and autistic spectrum disorders. It's the latest in a continuous line of epidemiological studies and, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive epidemiological study to look at exposure to both MMR and thimerosal-containing vaccines. (The MMR vaccine, being a live…
oracknows | July 5, 2006PZ may have wasted his life preparing students for medical school, and Skeptico may have wished that he had thought of this first, but what about me, a real physician, who, if EoR is correct, has utterly wasted his life actually going to medical school?
Read this excerpt from EoR's Words to a Potential Medical Student and see what I mean:
Before you enroll for that medical course, consider carefully whether it's the best path for your life. Perhaps complementary medicine is actually a better way to go, with many clear advantages...
The course is shorter. Never mind years of study and…
oracknows | July 3, 2006I used to like The Cancer Blog. I really did. It was one of the first medical blogs I discovered many months ago when I first dipped my toe into the blogosphere. Indeed, less than two months after I started blogging, one of The Cancer Blog's bloggers then, Dr. Leonardo Faoro, even invited me to join him as one of its bloggers. Although as a new blogger I was very flattered by the attention and offer, I nonetheless reluctantly turned the offer down because at the time I didn't know whether this whole blogging thing would work out and was afraid of being tied down and obligated to provide a…
oracknows | July 2, 2006The guys over at Medgaget are guys after my own heart. After commenting on a dubious-sounding device called the emWave Personal Stress Reliever, which, as its makers claim, is Scientifically Validated:
Stress creates incoherence in our heart rhythms. However, when we are in a state of high heart rhythm coherence the nervous system, heart, hormonal and immune systems are working efficiently and we feel good emotionally. emWave Personal Stress Reliever helps you reduce your emotional stress by displaying your level of heart rhythm coherence in real time. But emWave does more than just display…
oracknows | July 1, 2006This just cracked me up this morning:
NEW YORK - Kevin Trudeau, the million-selling author, infomercial star and convicted felon, swears that his new health guide, "More Natural 'Cures' Revealed," is 100 percent true.
Make that 100 percent true "in essence."`
"My point is I don't want to be caught in what is true, what isn't true, what is opinion, what is an idea," Trudeau, whose self-published "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About," thrived despite his criminal past and other legal run-ins, said.
"More Natural Cures," released in May and also self-published, is a sequel to "…
oracknows | June 30, 2006While thinking about ways to make the blog better, I wondered if I should emulate some of my colleagues, many of whom have regular features every week, often on Friday. And, since I usually get a little less serious on Fridays anyway (and, because traffic seems to fall off 50% or more anyway regardless of what I post, on the weekends, too), it seemed like a good idea. But I couldn't think of something that ties together the common themes of this blog, yet maintains a suitably Friday-blogging light-hearted feel to it. And then I came across this article:
L. R. Milgrom (2006). Towards a New…
oracknows | June 28, 2006Damn you, Kathleen.
Every time I think that I can give the whole mercury/autism thing a rest for a while and move on to less infuriating pastures, you keep finding things that keep dragging me back to the pit of pseudoscience inhabited by Dr. Mark Geier and his son David. The first time around, Kathleen found the Geiers misrepresenting David Geier's credentials on published journal articles to make it appear that David Geier had done the work reported in the articles at George Washington University when in fact he had not. I found David Geier's appropriation of the name of George Washington…
oracknows | June 27, 2006Busy at NIH Study section today, I didn't have time to compose anything extensive. (And there is most definitely something that needs a little Respectful Insolence going on; unfortunately, it will have to wait until tomorrow to receive it.) Fortunately, I had some thing in reserver for just such an occasion. From my e-mail several weeks ago (name & location withheld):
Dr. Orac,
My name is D. I am a Chiropractor and a Medical Doctor (IM resident at Medical Center X). I knew something wasn't right about the whole Chiropractic thing about half way through my education but could never quite…
oracknows | June 26, 2006I've written several times about two young victims of what is normally a highly treatable cancer (Hodgkin's lymphoma) and how, with their parents' support, they have jeopardized their lives by choosing alternative therapies. The first, Katie Wernecke, was initially taken from her family by the State of Texas, but her parents ultimately won a court battle and took her out of the state for altie treatment with vitamin C infusions. Presently, she is somewhere out of state receiving some unknown treatment that, according to her father, he cannot disclose or the doctors will no longer treat her.…
oracknows | June 21, 2006It's been a very interesting week for those of us who try to keep an eye on antivaccination warriors who scare mothers with claims based on either no science or bad science of dire consequences that will come from vaccinating their children.
A very interesting week indeed, kind of like that old curse, "May you live in interesting times."
Last week, eight years after his study that set off scare whose repercussions continue even now, Andrew Wakefield was finally called to account for professional misconduct for unreported conflicts of interest and highly unethical and unprofessional behavior.…
oracknows | June 20, 2006Australian skeptic Peter Bowditch was challenged by a homeopath to take some homeopathic 200C belladonna tablets. Ever the intrepid skeptic and critical thinker, Peter has now answered the challenge in front of 100 people and reported his experience, beginning with a description of what he should have experienced:
A Modern Herbal by Mrs Maud Grieve, where it says that I should have been experiencing ""Strange indescribable feelings with giddiness, yawning, staggering or falling on attempting to walk; dryness of mouth and throat, sense as of suffocation, swallowing difficult, voice husky; face…
oracknows | June 19, 2006Almost two months ago, I posted a rather light-hearted skeptical takedown of a guy by the name of Don Lemmon, who billed himself on his website as The #1 Nutritionist Online. The main gimmicks of the post were twofold. First, I poked fun at his selling of dessicated animal glands, in which he harkened back to a 16th century alchemist and physician named Paracelsus to justify what appeared to me to be a variant of the quackery known as live cell therapy. The second part of my schtick was to feign envy at the success that he appeared to be having over it all, marrying a retired porn star,…