complementary and alternative medicine
I'm currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel later today! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2006.
I have to apologize for last week's Dose of Woo. No, I'm not…
I'm currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel later today! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two (or three), but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2006.
Alright, I admit it.
I went a little overboard…
Blogging is usually such an instant gratification sort of thing. I see a story or hear about something. I write about it. I almost have to. Most stories in the blogosphere have a really short half-life anyway. Wait more than a day or two, and no one cares anymore. Hell, wait more than a few hours in the case of hyperkinetic bloggers like P.Z. will be all over it. However, sometimes it's a good idea to restrain myself, not to leap on something right away even when I can.
This is one of those times.
Last week, I was tipped off by the merry band of anti-vaccine loons over at Age of Autism to a…
Two of the major themes on this blog since the very beginning has been the application of science- and evidence-based medicine to the care of patients and why so much of so-called "complementary and alternative" medicine, as well as fringe movements like the anti-vaccine movement, have little or--more commonly--virtually no science to support their claims and recommendations. One major shortcoming of the more commonly used evidence-based medicine paradigm (EBM) that has been in ascendance as the preferred method of evaluating clinical evidence. Specifically, as Dr. Kimball Atwood IV (1, 2, 3…
Last week, I wrote about how Senator Tom Harkin is up to his old shenanigans again, trying at ever turn to do for the actual practice of quackery what he did for the research of quackery by creating the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and what he still does to promote quackery by berating NCCAM for in essence being too scientific in not having validated enough of his cherished woo. In essence, Harkin has slipped a provision into the Senate version of the 600+ page health care reform bill that is currently taking shape in Congress that included funding for "…
I love Mitchell and Webb, and this is just one reason why. They totally get homeopathy, as this video e-mailed to me by a reader demonstrates:
Pay close attention to the signs in the A & E. Too bad this is too late for Homeopathy Awareness Week.
And they're funny, to boot. While I'm on the subject of homeopathy, I know I've posted it before, but it's never wrong to repost an oldie but goody, the classic Homeopathic E.R.:
Here in the States, it's one of those rare long holiday weekends spanning Friday through Sunday instead of the usual Saturday through Monday. Because I'm working on a…
I may be a little late to the party, but that's because my laptop happens to have ad blocking software installed. However, blog bud PalMD rubbed my nose into a little kerfuffle that's been going on here the last couple of days. Basically, some really, really bad advertisements have been popping up. Ads for quackery like this popped up:
Lovely. Here I am pointing out why the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy is an unethical boondoggle of a quackfest, full of violations of the most basic protections for human subjects, and what's appearing above my post?
Ads for chelation therapy! And I…
Last year, a seeming victory for the protection of human subjects from being subjected to pseudoscience. It began when Kimball C. Atwood IV, MD; Elizabeth Woeckner, AB, MA; Robert S. Baratz, MD, DDS, PhD; and Wallace I. Sampson, MD published a lengthy criticism of the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) in Medscape, pointing out that it was a boondoggle that was not only not based on sound science but was in fact risky to patients and riddled with conflicts of interest and administered by highly dubious practitioners. If you want to know just how bad the National Center for…
Earlier this year, I wrote about Senator Tom Harkin's attempt to hijack President Obama's health care reform plans in order to inject quackery in the form of "alternative" or "integrative" medicine into the effort. Specifically, he wants to legitimize quackery by including it in any federal plan under the guise of "preventative care." He even went so far as to invite the Four Horsement of the Woopocalypse into the Senate to testify and castigate the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine for being too scientific and not proving that any of his favored woo works. Of course…
I waited.
I knew it was coming. It had to. History was on my side. My quarry was nutty, but in a way exceedingly predictable. it wasn't so much that I knew exactly what he would do. He wasn't predictable in that way. It was that I knew he would do something crazy. Actually, on second thought, I did know what he was going to do. I had only to consider how ghoulishly he treated Tony Snow and Bernie Mac, and Tim Russert and how he leapt at the opportunity to abuse Christina Applegate. To him, when a dying celebrity like Patrick Swayze rejected quackery, it was more than he could stand. Whenever…
If you had the choice between the "standard" option for insurance or the naturopathic option, which would you choose?
(Click to see the full cartoon; it's a bit old. But I hadn't seen it before; so it's new to me.)
Of course, this is the very reason alt-med boosters don't want anyone to have to choose. They want to "integrate" their quackery into scientific medicine.
If there's one thing that I've found that's simultaneously gratifying and somewhat infuriating over the last year or so, it's that the skeptical movement has finally really noticed that anti-vaccination movement in a big way. Those of us who've been on the blogospheric front lines for the last few years have sometimes been frustrated that this issue, at least until recently, got so little attention outside of our dedicated little circle and the much larger circle of anti-vaccine zealots and the quacks who enable and encourage them.
That's not to say that there weren't some prominent skeptics…
I have a love-hate relationship with Mike Adams.
Mike Adams, regular readers of this blog, is the "intellectual force" between that repository of quackery and sheer lunacy, NaturalNews.com. I hate him because he is a vile human being who cheerfully promotes bogus therapies on his website. (You know, I think we skeptics should borrow Simon Singh's phraseology at every opportunity.) He's also an opportunistic ghoul who never, ever misses an opportunity to take advantage of a celebrity who's suffering from or dying of cancer to make breathlessly hysterical claims that they would have lived if…
Unfortunately, I saw this coming, although I had thought that it might be a few more months. Farrah Fawcett has lost her three year battle with anal cancer:
Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and bewitched a generation of men, beginning with a celebrated pinup poster, died Thursday morning in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 62 and lived in West Los Angeles.
Her death, at St. John's Health Center, was caused by anal cancer, which she had been battling since 2006, said her spokesman, Paul Bloch.
To an…
The other day, I came across an update on the Daniel Hauser saga. Specifically, I commented about how he is not only undergoing the chemotherapy ordered by his doctors. As you may recall, Hauser is a 13-year-old boy who, after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and undergoing one round of chemotherapy, refused to undergo any more. His mother supported him, and ultimately a judge had to order Daniel's parents to make sure that he underwent standard therapy for his very curable form of cancer. Daniel's mother Colleen took off with him shortly afterward, rumored to be heading for Tijuana.…
At the risk of repeating myself (but, then, since when did such concerns ever stop me before?), I'll just start out by mentioning that, of all the non-herbal "alternative" medicine remedies out there, I used to give a bit of a pass to acupuncture. No, I never did buy any of that nonsense about how sticking thin needles into the skin at points along various "meridians" somehow "redirects the flow of qi," that mystical life force upon which so much woo, particularly woo based on Eastern mysticism and traditional Chinese medicine depends. However, because acupuncture involves an actual physical…
Last week, I wrote about the FDA's warning about the zinc-containing "homeopathic" cold remedy known as Zicam. Basically, Zicam was approved without testing to show it to be both safe and efficacious because it slipped in using an old 1938 law that allows homeopathic remedies to bypass the usual process for FDA approval. Too bad that, due to the zinc in Zicam, it can cause anosmia, or the loss of the sense of smell.
Stephen Colbert, of course, thinks it must be the Democrats who are plotting against one of Rush Limbaugh's main sponsors:
The Colbert Report
Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c…
Over the last month or so, I've written numerous posts about Daniel Hauser. Danny, as you recall, is the 13-year-old Minnesota boy who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma back in February, underwent one round of chemotherapy for it, and then decided that he wanted to pursue quackery instead of more chemotherapy. His mother supported his decision and justified it by appealing to a faux Native American religion known as Nemenhah, which is, in reality, nothing more than an excuse for its originator, a wannabe who named himself Chief Cloudpiler, to sell quackery under the guise of "Native…
Homeopathy Awareness Week is almost over, alas. I hope I've done a good job at making my readers even more "aware" of just how silly the principles of homeopathy are. To finish up, I thought I'd repost a bit of "classic insolence" from three years ago, because it's dedicated to one of the most amazing homeopathic woo-meisters I've ever seen: Lionel Milgrom. It was also the very first post I ever did for Your Friday Dose of Woo.
Enjoy!
While 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…
With Homeopathy Awareness Week rapidly approaching its end, I wondered just what I could do to bring further "awareness" of just how bogus and full of woo the concepts of homeopathy are. True, discussing homeopathic plutonium as a remedy and how homeopaths did "provings" of it the other day was fun, but surely there's more. What other homeopathic "remedies" (quotation marks used because of a complaint about my having actually used the term "remedy" to describe homeopathy, given that any true homeopathic remedy is diluted so much that there's nothing left but water--or alcohol, if that is what…