Friday Woo
oracknows | September 22, 2017Back in the day I used to do a weekly feature every Friday that I used to call Your Friday Dose of Woo. For purposes of the bit, woo consisted of particularly ridiculous or silly bits of pseudoscience, quackery, or mysticism, such as the Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface. Amazingly, I managed to keep that up for a couple of years, but over time I started sensing that I was getting a bit too repetitive. The same bits of pseudoscience kept recurring. Over time I had to dig more and more to find suitable bits of woo that amused me enough to inspire me to ever more over-the-top heights of…
oracknows | September 12, 2016In the early days of this blog, I came up with a concept. That concept was based on the idea that on Friday I would try hard not to be so serious. On Fridays, I would seek out the finest woo in the world and aim a bit of my not-so-Respectful Insolence. Thus was born Your Friday Dose of Woo. It was a serious that I maintained close to religiously for nearly two years, before I started to feel the strain of having to com eup with something funny or quirky on every Friday. So gradually I let the series go, until it became an occasional feature. These days, it’s so occasional now that the last…
oracknows | November 14, 2014
It’s been a long and entertaining week. Well, at least part of the week was entertaining. After all, it was hard not to be mightily amused at what happened when Dr. Mehmet Oz, known to the world as America’s Doctor but to skeptics as America’s Quack, asked his Twitter followers to ask him anything under the hashtag #OzsInBox. It was, to put it mildly, a train wreck, but to skeptics it was an enormously entertaining train wreck. It seems fitting to finish it off with yet another example that provides compelling evidence of just how quacky naturopathy is. Why? Because it’s a point that can’t…
oracknows | April 5, 2013Over the years this blog's been in existence, I've fallen into a habit in which I tend to like to finish off the week taking on a bit of science (well, usually pseudoscience) that is either really out there, really funny, or in general not as heavy as, for example, writing about someone like Stanislaw Burzysnki. Indeed, for nearly two years, I even turned into a feature, Your Friday Dose of Woo. Eventually, I got a bit tired of being straitjacketed into having to find something kooky or wacky every Friday, and I let the feature lapse. That doesn't mean that I don't still deliver an occasional…
oracknows | March 15, 2013It's been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.
Besides indulging my taste for shamelessly working lyrics from Led Zeppelin and other classic bands into my post, what am I talking about? Simple. Things have been way too serious lately. I mean, just look at yesterday's post. Sure, I framed it semi-humorously, with The Evil Skeptics infiltrating the screening of the Burzynski sequel, but part of the reason that I did that is because the subject matter is so unrelentingly depressing. That's why when a reader sent me a link to the victim target subject of…
oracknows | December 13, 2012Note: Orac is away somewhere warm recharging his Tarial cells for further science and skepticism. In the meantime, he is rerunning some of his favorite posts. Because it's vacation, he thought he'd rerun a fun post. He needs it; vacation is almost over, and it's back to work on Monday. So, here's one from 2007. I believe I reran it once a few years ago, but it's been at least three years, which means that if you haven't been reading at least that long it's new to you. Besides, it's the post that introduced me to the woo-tastic wonder that it Lionel Milgrom.
While thinking about ways to make…
oracknows | May 11, 2012It's been a while since I've done a bit of Your Friday Dose of Woo, and I actually kind of miss it. It's not that there hasn't been anything that hasn't been worthy of this "honor" for a while. On the other hand, there hasn't been anything in a while that combines just the right proportions of pure woo, utter ridiculousness, and pure pseudoscience to provide the perfect "inspiration" to start me on a roll. Oh, it's out there, but for some reason I've let myself become bogged down by topics that are just too serious. It's time to lighten up, at least for a little while.
So it was when I came…
oracknows | June 10, 2011It's been another rather rough week. Grant season is in full swing, and I'm busily writing away. As I get to the end of the week, I wondered: Should I be serious or should I post a bit of fluff? Given the crappy mood I've been in on and off (grants added to my usual responsibilities tend to do that to me), I know what I need, and I need it fast. I need it now. I need it bad. I need...some woo. And nothing but the best will do. But what? Over the years I've done Your Friday Dose of Woo, I thought I had seen it all. Well, not exactly all. Rather, it thought I had seen most of it, but…
oracknows | April 29, 2011With the utter ridiculousness of the arguments laid down by Dr. Oz when Steve Novella appeared on his show and the even more ridiculous silliness of J.B. Handley thinking that Matt Carey, a.k.a. Sullivan, is really Bonnie Offit, I had originally thought that I should find some peer-reviewed scientific article today to do a sober, serious analysis of some cool bit of science. Hey, it sounded like a good idea. Then I finished my day, which was my clinic day, and I was simply too tired to summon up the effort it would take to go through a paper, analyze it, and write up that analysis for the…
oracknows | March 5, 2011Due to my activities at the Society of Surgical Oncology meeting in San Antonio, somehow I didn't manage to crank out a bit of that Insolence, Respectful or Not-So-Respectful, that you all crave. So, given that this is Friday, I thought I'd to a "rerun" of a bit of classic woo. This one's a little newer than the reruns I usually do, only two and a half years old. So, if you've been reading less than two years, it's new to you!
In the nearly two years of its existence, I have strived to feature only the finest and most outrageous woo that I can find. It's mostly been medical quackery but…
oracknows | March 4, 2011Due to my activities at the Society of Surgical Oncology meeting in San Antonio, somehow I didn't manage to crank out a bit of that Insolence, Respectful or Not-So-Respectful, that you all crave. So, given that this is Friday, I thought I'd to a "rerun" of a bit of classic woo. This one's a little newer than the reruns I usually do, only a little less than two years old. So, if you've been reading less than two years, it's new to you! Maybe I'll even post another one later.
Ever since I started this little vanity bit known as Your Friday Dose of Woo, lo, these nearly three years ago, when I…
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 | September 24, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. Besides getting into full R01 grant-writing swing, I went out to dinner last night with a visiting professor and didn't get home until too late for me to grind out one of those 2,000-4,000 word screeds you've come to know and a love. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in November 2006 that, shockingly, as far as I can tell I've never "rerun" before. Remember, if you've been reading less than four…
oracknows | August 13, 2010After nearly six years subjecting the world to my meandering and often incredibly verbose stylings, I'm now what you would call an established blogger. Even more than that, I'm a reasonably high traffic blogger, at least in the medical blogosphere. What that means is that I get a lot of e-mail. A lot. While I do look at each and every e-mail that finds its way into the in box of one of my accounts, there's no way I can respond to them all. In order to save time, I look for shortcuts, and one of those shortcuts is not to devote more than a second or two to e-mails that are obvious sales…
oracknows | July 30, 2010A couple of days ago, I expressed my amusement at an e-mail sent to me by someone named "Carol." The amusement came primarily from the subject matter in the e-mail, which described something called a "biophoton ionizer," whatever that is. Knowing, as I do, how prevalent water woo is (after all, what is homeopathy but the grand daddy of all water woo?), I was naturally curious about what the heck a "biophoton ionizer" is. After all, what's the difference between a regular photon and a "biophoton"? What is the characteristic of the photon that makes it "bio," if you know what I mean. I was sure…
oracknows | May 7, 2010
Remember Life Technology� Back when I actually used to do Your Friday Dose of Woo each and every Friday before subjecting myself to such woo-tastically extravagant bits of unreason every week led me to decide to cut my weekly feature back to on an "as the mood strikes me" basis, Life Technology produceds some of the finest installments of this recurring series. Who could forget Vir-X⢠homeopathic boner pills? Or the the Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet Professional Version 1.0� Or the Tesla Purple Energy Shield� Good times, for sure.
As I sat down last night to decide upon a…
oracknows | March 26, 2010I have an MD and a PhD. While many people find that to be impressive, personally I've become so inured of it that I certainly don't take note of it much anymore. Certainly, I rarely point it out. So, you may ask, why am I pointing it out this time, even going so far as to start a post with it? The answer is simple. If there was one thing I always thought about having both an MD and a PhD, it's that it should render one more resistant to pseudoscience and woo. I know, I know, maybe I'm being incredibly arrogant or incredibly naive--possibly both--but it was what I thought for a long time, even…
oracknows | March 16, 2010I realize that I've said many times before that there is no such thing as "alternative" medicine. There is medicine that has been shown to work through science, medicine that has not yet been shown to work, and medicine that has been shown not to work. "Alternative" medicine that is shown to work through science ceases to be "alternative" and becomes simply medicine.
There are times when I think I might need to change that opinion.
Well, not exactly. However, promoters of various forms of alternative medicine, stymied when they try to show that their woo works through science, seem to think…
oracknows | February 26, 2010I realize that there are two huge target-rich articles out there that my readers have been clamoring for me to comment on. First, there's a particularly silly and simplistic article by Nicholas Kristof about how it's supposedly the "toxins" causing autism (an article in which he apparently doesn't realize that Current Opinions in Pediatrics is not really a peer-reviewed journal but rather publishes review articles by invitation), and then there's a fawning TIME Magazine article bout Jenny McCarthy. When two such--shall we say?--target-rich articles appear on the same day, I'd be falling all…
oracknows | January 29, 2010I've sort of alluded to it, but grant fever took over the last couple of days as the deadline approaches. Unfortunately, it happened right around the time when the GMC ruling on Andrew Wakefield came down and came down hard on him and his unethical behavior. Oh, well, as they say, it looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. In any case, I doubt I'll get to Wakers before Monday, if then, given that there might be other things that catch my interest by then. In the meantime, as I recover from pulling a couple of near all-nighters in a row, check out this Classic Insolence from…