complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | November 22, 2010It figures.
I'm gone for a couple of days, paying little attention to the blogosphere or the Internet, and something big has to happen.
Remember a couple of weeks ago, when in the context of asking how we should respond to the anti-vaccine movement I discussed a recent campaign by the anti-vaccine group SafeMinds to infiltrate theaters with its deceptive anti-vaccine public service announcement (PSA) over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend? Well, it turns out that two of the three biggest American anti-vaccine groups, SafeMinds and Generation Rescue, teamed up to try to raise money to get these…
oracknows | November 19, 2010The other day I had a bit of fun deconstructing a shockingly bad post by a blogger at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism named Dan Olmsted. In his post, he criticized the progressive movement for not "getting" autism. It was one of the silliest bits of whining I had ever seen, in essence a crybaby crying because "his people" weren't paying attention to his book.
Shockingly, yesterday Olmsted was able to find a post from a "progressive" who was willing to drink deeply of the anti-vax Kool Aid without realizing that he's doing so and agree with him. For instance, let's take a look at…
oracknows | November 18, 2010In terms of promoting woo and quackery, there is one person who stands head and shoulders above all the rest. True, she doesn't just promote woo and quackery, but she does have a long list of dubious achievements in that realm, including but not limited to unleashing Jenny McCarthy and her anti-vaccine crusade plus Suzanne Somers and her "bioidentical hormone" and cancer quackeries on an unsuspecting American public. She's also subjected us to both Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz to the point of actually launching them on their own shows, promoting the mystcial mumbo-jumbo wish fulfillment that is The…
oracknows | November 18, 2010Homeopathy remains the perfect quackery because it is nothing but water. Even homeopaths seem to recognize this implicitly. If they did not, then there would be no need for all the mental mastubation they engage in to imbue their magic water with "memory," such that, as Tim Minchin so famously put it, it "remembers" all the good stuff it's been in contact with but forgets all the poo that's been in it. Truly, it is magic. Alternatively, homepaths will try to claim that the process of dilution and vigorous shaking between each serial dilution (or, as homepaths refer to it, succussion) somehow…
oracknows | November 15, 2010Earlier today, I had a bit of fun deconstructing Dan Olmsted's whiny complaint about how "progressives don't 'get' autism," his definition of "getting" autism being, of course, buying into the scientifically discredited notion that vaccines cause autism and the quackery known as "autism biomed" that anti-vaccine loons like Olmsted advocate to "recover" autistic children. Of course, I wrote my little bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence last night; so I didn't get to see a rather amusing additional bit of information showing Olmsted to be clueless that happened to pop up today. First, let's look…
oracknows | November 15, 2010Every so often on this blog I get in the mood to take on a post on the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism. Over the three years of its existence, I've seen some truly bizarre posts, ranging from one blogger blithely discussing how he took his daughter to Costa Rica for stem cell quackery to treat her autism to rants against journalists who have the temerity to point out that the scientific evidence out there does not support the idea that vaccines cause autism to attacks on perceived enemies of the anti-vaccine movement in which these enemies have their heads crudely Photoshopped into…
oracknows | November 14, 2010Yesterday my wife and I were doing a bit of shopping for various household supplies at one of our favorite stores, our local Target. Having already been disturbed by the sheer volume of Christmas decorations and items on sale two weeks before Thanksgiving, I was even more disturbed to see this:
Yep, it's everywhere. Oscillococcinum. A homeopathic treatment, quackery right there on the shelves. The only thing good I could think of to say about this is that it's absolutely true that this remedy is, as advertised on the package, non-drowsy, with no interactions with other drugs, and without…
oracknows | November 12, 2010Last night, seeking to expand the name of Orac rather than his waistline, I did a skeptical meetup with a local skeptics' group to discuss the topic of quackademic medicine. A fine time was had by all (at least as far as I can tell). What that means, unfortunately, is that I got back too late last night to have time to prepare a helping of new insolence that you all crave. (And you know you do crave it so.) Fortunately, the archives are here and chock full of excellent woo to republish from time to time, perfect for this situation, and I'm taking advantage of them now. The installation from…
oracknows | November 12, 2010Last night, seeking to expand the name of Orac rather than his waistline, I did a skeptical meetup with a local skeptics' group to discuss the topic of quackademic medicine. A fine time was had by all (at least as far as I can tell). What that means, unfortunately, is that I got back too late last night to have time to prepare a helping of new insolence that you all crave. (And you know you do crave it so.) Fortunately, the archives are here and chock full of excellent woo to republish from time to time, perfect for this situation, and I'm taking advantage of them now. The installation from…
oracknows | November 11, 2010I don't know how I missed this article. I really don't. It's over a week old, and it's exactly the sort of irritating cancer quackery that normally draws me irresistibly to it to slather it in a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence. After all, being a cancer surgeon and all, I really, really hate cancer quackery, even more so than I detest other forms of quackery. I hate it even more when it comes from Mike Adams, creator of NaturalNews.com, that one-stop shop for all things quackery, anti-vaccine, and conspiracy. Basically, it's an example of Mike Adams discovering something about…
oracknows | November 10, 2010I didn't feel much like blogging last night, but I felt as though I had to, even if it's brief.
Yesterday was one of those crappy days where there were a lot of problems that didn't relent, so much so that I was completely occupied and didn't check my e-mail until the evening. It was at that point that I wish I hadn't. What I found in my in box was a whole slew of e-mails informing me that a friend had died.
Mark was a friend I had never met.
One of the odd things about the Internet is that it is indeed quite possible to become virtual friends with someone, forging a friendship that lasts for…
oracknows | November 9, 2010It occurs to me that I ought to thank Mark Hyman, "pioneer of functional medicine," and creator of "Ultrawellness," particularly since he started blogging for that wretched hive of scum and quackery (WHSQ), The Huffington Post. He may not post all that often, but when he does I can be assured that the woo will be flowing in torrents from HuffPo to my computer screen, thus providing me with yet another dose of blogging material. Not surprisingly, given Hyman's history, his latest bit on HuffPo is no different. Entitled Cancer Research: New Science on How to Prevent and Treat Cancer From TEDMED…
oracknows | November 8, 2010I advocate science-based medicine (SBM) on this blog. However, from time to time, consider it necessary to point out that SBM is not the same thing as turning medicine into a science. Rather, I argue that what we do as clinicians should be based in science. Contrary to what some might claim, this is not a distinction without a difference. If we were practicing pure science, we would theoretically be able to create algorithms and flowcharts telling us how to care for patients with any given condition, and we would never deviate from them. It is true that we do have algorithms and flowcharts…
oracknows | November 5, 2010As Vaccine Awareness Week, originally proclaimed by Joe Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher to spread pseudoscience about vaccines far and wide and then coopted by me and several other bloggers to counter that pseudoscience, draws to a close, I was wondering what to write about. After all, from my perspective, on the anti-vaccine side Vaccine Awareness Week had been a major fizzle. Joe Mercola had posted a series of nonsensical articles about vaccines, as expected, but Barbara Loe Fisher appeared to have sat this one out, having posted nothing. Well, not quite. More like almost nothing. I noticed…
oracknows | October 29, 2010If there's one thing that confounds advocates of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), it's the placebo effect. That's because, whenever most such remedies are studied using rigorous clinical trial design using properly constituted placebo controls, they almost always end up showing effects no greater than placebo effects. That's the main reason why they frequently suggest that, you know, all those rigorous, carefully constructed randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials aren't really the best way to investigate their woo after all. To them, it's much better to do "…
oracknows | October 28, 2010I was out late last night due to the call of duty. By the time I got home, it was too late, and I was too beat to provide you with the heapin' helpin' of Insolence, Respectful or not-so-Respectful, that I usually do. Nor did I have time to draft a substantive reply to Dr. Zilberberg, who is in the comments and apparently very unhappy that I criticized her for her tendency towards dualism and her repeating various things that sound similar to some of the favorite gambits of the anti-vaccine movement. I had basically had the temerity to suggest to Dr. Zilberberg that, if she doesn't want to be…
oracknows | October 27, 2010On Monday I took a blogger by the name of Dr. Marya Zilberberg to task for firing a series of profoundly anti-scientific broadsides against science-based medicine (SBM). Although I did not attack Dr. Zilberberg personally, I was quite harsh in my characterization of her attacks, because, well, they were quite bad, full of straw men, special pleading, and the claim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, all topped off with a particularly egregious mischaracterization of what SBM is. Steve Novella also piled on, which was appropriate because Dr. Zilberberg's attacks were mainly…
oracknows | October 26, 2010Forgive me if I'm feeling a little schadenfreude right now.
My current blog location has been criticized in the past for a variety of things, including, most recently, Pepsigate. One of the things that we've been criticized for is our on-again off-again use of Google Adsense, where the content of the page dictates which ads pop up. For skeptical blogs, this sometimes has some rather embarrassing consequences. For instance, when I write about vaccines, sometimes the ad server would serve up ads for chelation therapy or anti-vaccine quack nostrums. Ditto when I wrote about homeopathy, which…
oracknows | October 26, 2010Oh, goody. Just what we need.
Some of my readers sent this to me yesterday, and I, like them, was appalled. Apparently that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, has decided that it's starting a "real" health section (to be, apparently, distinguished from its old "Lifestyle" section, where previously most of its health quackery reporting and commentary resided (and presumably will still reside). Also, yes, I know I use the term "wretched hive of scum and quackery" whenever I mention HuffPo these days, but that's just because that's just what HuffPo is when it comes to…
oracknows | October 25, 2010Over my nearly six years of blogging, I've become known as a staunch advocate of science- and evidence-based medicine, both in the guise going under my long-used pseudonym "Orac" and under my real name. And so I am, which is why certain varieties of predictable attacks on science-based medicine (SBM) annoy me. Usually, they come down to appeals to other ways of knowing, rants against "arrogance," or tu quoque arguments trying to claim that SBM is as bad as whatever woo I happen to be criticizing at the time. Actually, strike that. The latter complaint often tries to argue that SBM is actually…