complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | February 1, 2010...from, of all places, a Daily Kos diary.
Although the post itself is quite good, some of the comments make baby Jesus cry. There's even one repeating the old myth about H. pylori and how Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were supposedly "ostracized" for their "heresy" back in the 1980s.
Still, it's good to see that the GMC ruling is having an effect as far as spreading the message about Andrew Wakefield.
oracknows | January 31, 2010
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue.
Well, not really. Maybe it looks more like I picked the wrong NIH grant cycle to be submitting an R01. After all, the deadline for my getting my grant to my university's grant's office coincided very closely with the announcement of the General Medical Council's ruling in the Andrew Wakefield case on Thursday. As I pointed out in a brief post yesterday, the complete 143-page ruling can be found here (if you want to avoid AoA or Generation Rescue) or here (if you want to annoy J.B. Handley by showing traffic coming from this blog…
oracknows | January 31, 2010This may be a bit over the top, but it does rather point out what is in effect done when journalists lazily present "both sides" of issues that don't really have two sides, at least not two sides that are anywhere in the same universe as far as scientific validity:
I do rather think that they could have found a better example for "Western" versus "alternative" medicine. That part of the video was actually pretty dumb and, quite frankly, painfully unfunny. Come on! A Hulda Clark parody, where the alt-med practitioner claims that all cancer is caused by a liver fluke and that it can be cured…
oracknows | January 30, 2010Thanks to having been up all night Thursday night and most of the night a couple of days before that working on a grant, I know I haven't had a chance to write about the GMC's ruling on Andrew Wakefield's unethical conduct in conducting his "clinical research" that according to him linked the MMR vaccine to autism. That dubious and possibly even fraudulent research ultimately fueled the anti-vaccine movement in the U.K. and, aided and abetted by the sensationalistic and credulous U.K. media, Wakefield started an MMR scare that persists to this day, having led to vaccination uptake rates…
oracknows | January 26, 2010Almost two years ago, I discovered something that disturbed me greatly. Basically, I learned the story of an Air Force officer named Col. Richard Niemtzow, MD, PhD. Col. Niemtzow is a radiation oncologist who has over the last decade fallen deeply into woo. Specifically, he has become known for a technique that he has dubbed "battlefield acupuncture," a technique that he has promoted energetically (word choice intentional) and ceaselessly, to the point where, sadly, the military is starting to take it seriously even though the evidence Col Niemtzow has presented in favor of the technique is…
oracknows | January 25, 2010
It's amazing how these "natural" medicine mavens reveal their true nature when faced with a little adversity. As you may recall, Mike Adams was eliminated from the running for a Shorty Award in Health, thanks to the cluelessness of his fans and followers. He immediately erupted into tirades full of conspiracy-mongering, as well as a hilariously off-base, spittle-flecked attack on "skeptics" that was so full of straw men that his adopted Central American home will probably have to import straw for its farm animals for the foreseeable future. As a result of his being eliminated, Mike Adams…
oracknows | January 24, 2010Mike Adams is confused.
I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn't have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there you go. Speaking of writing an NIH R01, that's exactly what I'm doing now, hence the decreased blogorrhea over the last few days, but sometimes trying to cram a five year project into the 13 pages (one page for specific aims and twelve to describe the project) makes my head hurt so much that reading and…
oracknows | January 23, 2010Oh, yes, my brothers and sisters, we have done it!
My pharma paymasters are very, very pleased indeed with me and all of their other blogging and Twittering minions. Very, very pleased indeed. In fact, they are cackling with glee over the discomfiture of one of their greatest enemies, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger! This brave rebel's plan to attack the conspiracy by winning a Shorty Award in Health has been thwarted, thanks to the efforts of you and me, oh my brothers and sisters, and The Health Ranger has gone completely mental about it:
I was set to take the top prize, and Dr.…
oracknows | January 22, 2010One week ago, The Chicago Tribune added yet another excellent addition to its recent series of articles exposing the dark underbelly of the anti-vaccine movement and, more importantly, the quackery that permeates the "autism biomedical" movement promoted by anti-vaccine groups such as Age of Autism. The first installment in the series, written by Tribune reporters Trine Tsouderos and Pat Callahan, examined Mark and David Geier's Lupron protocol for autism (which I had written about three years ago under the title Why not just castrate them?), and the second shone a light under the rock…
oracknows | January 20, 2010Last night was grant crunch time to get a truly serviceable draft to my collaborators today as promised, leaving enough time to revise it by the February 5 deadline. That means the blog has to take a hit today, which is a shame, because Joe Mercola and Age of Autism have laid down some idiocy this week that I'm just dying to take down. Oh, well, it'll wait, and if it won't I'm sure there'll be new idiocy to take down (or, if I need a break, some good science to discuss) when I come up for air again. (In the case of Mercola, it's part one of a promised three part series; so waiting until he's…
oracknows | January 20, 2010Although I have a Twitter account, I really don't use it all that often, other than having set up an automatic feed to Tweet all my new posts for the blog. True, I do from time to time have flurries of activity (usually when I'm trapped in a particularly boring conference) or am inspired to tweak J.B. Handley or other anti-vaccine kooks when they start Tweeting nonsense, but for the most part I remain a blogging kind of a guy. One could argue whether it's my tendency towards logorrhea on the blog rendering me incapable of hewing to the 140 character limit for Twitter, but whatever the reason…
oracknows | January 19, 2010I'd like to start this post by thanking a commenter named Paul Grenville. He provided me with this blogging material and, indeed, may have supplied me with material for two blog posts. He did it by showing up in an old post about a homoepath named Jeremy Sherr, who has been bringing woo to the natives, so to speak, by treating HIV/AIDS patients in Africa with homeopathy. Sherr, as you may recall, Sherr had announced his plans to do "clinical trials" using homeopathy for HIV/AIDS and even bragged about treating Tanzanians with quackery. He then tried--shall we say?--to revise history by making…
oracknows | January 18, 2010The double standard of the anti-vaccine "autism biomed" movement never ceases to amaze me.
Imagine if you will, that a pharmaceutical company examined a chemical used for industrial purposes. Imagine further that the chemical this pharmaceutical company decided to look at originated as an industrial chelator designed to separate heavy metals from polluted soil and mining drainage. Imagine still further that that pharmaceutical company wanted to use that chemical as a treatment for autism, a chelator to be given to children. Finally, imagine that the drug company was giving this chemical to…
oracknows | January 14, 2010You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off the ol' Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim
- Jim Croce
I love it when a commenter gives me blogging material.
Let's face it. Blogging is a tough hobby. As much as I do love it so, sometimes I'm at a loss for blogging material. Some would argue that when that happens but not me. Why? Because the blogosphere will provide. At least, it has each and every time that I've ever run into difficulties. Of course, it's even nicer when blogging material is delivered up to me right there in the…
oracknows | January 13, 2010The Onion or real life recommendations by cancer quacks? You be the judge.
Courageous Man Refuses To Believe He Has Cancer
Sometimes The Onion cuts a little too deeply, but this is not too far from "Secret" territory. Unfortunately for wishful thinking, reality doesn't care what you believe and has a way of asserting itself no matter how hard you wish.
oracknows | January 13, 2010Yesterday, I expressed dismay at how Dr. Mehmet Oz, the protege of Oprah Winfrey who now has his own popular syndicated daily show, recently named the quackery known as reiki as number one in his list of "Dr. Oz's ulimate alternatie medicine secrets," leading me to characterize him as having "gone completely over to the Dark Side." You, my readers, kindly provided me with a YouTube video of actual segments from the show in which Dr. Oz has a reiki master demonstrate reiki on an audience member:
Ugh. Get aload of this introduction:
Now you're about to see things that are going to challenge…
oracknows | January 12, 2010For some reason, I've tended to give Dr. Mehmet Oz a bit of a free pass when it comes to promoting woo. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I just haven't paid that much attention to him. Perhaps it's because, even when he was on Oprah's show, he didn't delve as deeply into the woo as her other frequent guests, such as Christiane Northrup, Suzanne Sommers, or Jenny McCarthy. The one or two times I saw him with Oprah, usually online because I'm never home to watch Oprah during the day and on those rare days when I am home on a weekeday, trust me, I don't watch Oprah. Then Dr. Oz got his own…
oracknows | January 11, 2010I've discussed why Barbara Loe Fisher is a hypocritical coward for trying to silence her opponents using the courts. Now Rebecca Watson, a.k.a., The Skepchick, schools Barbara Loe Fisher for in essence pissing on the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
For some reason, my irony meter didn't register the point that the Skepchick laid down. Perhaps it had already been so completely vaporized by the Loe Fisher's ranting about wanting a "fearless conversation about vaccines" hot on the heels of having tried to sue Dr. Offit for doing just that.
You know what's rather interesting, though? Ever…
oracknows | January 9, 2010As regular readers know, I really like Tim Minchin's take on skepticism in general and on alternative medicine in particular. His piece de resistance thus far in his career is a "nine minute beat poem" entitled Storm, in which at a dinner party our performer is forced to deal with a female version of Mike Adams spewing nonsense about "natural remedies," how "science doesn't know everything," how "there's more" than just the material world and "you can't know anything," and how big pharma is just out for profit. Minchin's slapdown of this woo-filled nonsense is epic and hilarious.
It turns out…
oracknows | January 9, 2010I've said it before, and I've said it more times than I can remember. Purveyors of unscientific medicine don't have the goods. If they had the goods, then their nostrums wouldn't be called "alternative" medicine anymore; they'd just be medicine. Because they don't have the goods in the form of science and clinical evidence, all that leaves is to attack those who criticize their lack of science and clinical evidence. Most recently, we saw this in the reaction of the British Chiropractic Association, which is suing Simon Singh over the most bogus of reasons, and in the grande dame of the anti-…