Friday Woo
oracknows | October 19, 2007DNA is an amazing molecule. How evolution could have, over eons, fashioned such an amazingly simple yet complex method of storing biological information and coding the proteins that carry out the functions of life is one of the great wonders of biology. Harnessing the power of DNA, through genetic engineering, the study of the genome, and epigenetics, has allowed scientists a deeper insight than ever before possible into diseases as diverse as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and inherited metabolic disorders, to name a few. I manipulate DNA in my laboratory, in order to make it do my bidding…
oracknows | October 12, 2007Woo-meisters will not be pleased. While perusing this week's Skeptics' Circle, I was reminded of something that I had meant to post about a couple of days ago.
I don't know how he did it or where he got it, but somehow he has found the Holy of Holies for woos everywhere. He found The Woo Handbook. In it, he finds the twenty main strategies for dealing with Skeptics. They're pretty much all there: shifting the goalposts, labeling skeptics as "close-minded," introducing quantum mechanics, and appeals to ignorance, along with #18, the technique of woos that probably annoys me the most (at least…
oracknows | October 5, 2007Over the last 15 months that this regular Friday feature has been in existence, I've come across some real doozies in the world of woo. Who could forget, for example, quantum gyroscopic theories of homeopathy? Or the DNA activation guy? Or the "no plane" conspiracy theory of 9/11? Or a certain disgusting "feedback loop" for curing cancer? A few others stand out from the pack, like Healing Sounds and Dr. Emoto, as rare examples of just the right amount of superficial plausibility married to over-the-top craziness to be memorable.
This week's installment might just be one of these. It is truly…
oracknows | September 28, 2007
In looking back at all the various bizarre incarnations of woo that I've covered during the last year or so since I started doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was wondering if there was a form of woo that I had not covered yet. Woo seems to come in several forms, such as energy woo, water woo, pH woo, "detoxification" woo, religious woo, and psychic woo, among others, with certain themes that just keep recurring over and over. I'm sure there's enough material there for a Ph.D. thesis on the classification of woo, if some intrepid graduate student were interested. For this week, I was looking…
oracknows | September 21, 2007
As I usually do on Thursday nights, I was perusing my legendary Folder of Woo looking for just the thing to be interesting and entertaining to both me as the blogger and you as the reader. As happens occasionally, nothing was really doing it for me. Nothing was getting me fired up to launch into yet another installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo. I thought about going back to the well of Life Technology (believe it or not, there is still some woo there to which I have not yet applied my special brand of Respectful Insolenceâ¢), but somehow I just wasn't in the mood. Let's face it, after…
oracknows | September 14, 2007
Earlier this week, I deconstructed a truly inane article on Mike Adams NewsTarget website espousing dangerous cancer quackery, with claims that herbal concoctions alone could "naturally heal" cancer. Such a claim wouldn't have attracted bringing the hammer of Respectful Insolence⢠down if there had been some actual evidence presented that this healer could do what she claimed she could do. Unfortunately, as is the case with virtually all such claims, there was none, just a complicated regimen involving four or five different herbal brews involving a total of around 40 different plants and…
oracknows | September 7, 2007
I debated about whether to do Your Friday Dose of Woo this week.
I really wasn't sure if I was up to it. As regular readers know, I was on vacation in London during the last week in August. Unfortunately, I returned to the news of a death in the family on my wife's side, making the last few days a seriously saddening time. I even tried to keep blogging through it as a release to take my mind off of things, but, as the last two days showed, I reached the point where that didn't work anymore. I guess it's a good thing there's still quite a bit of stuff to be mined from the old blog archives…
oracknows | August 31, 2007...is still on vacation in London. It will return next week.
I will mention, however, that I managed to find time to take a stroll by the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital the other day. No, the fabric of space-time was not torn, but, sadly, I didn't work up the gumption to enter the building because I feared pressing my luck. It's one thing to stand outside the building and take a few pictures leaning against various signs; it's quite another to enter the belly of the beast itself. Such a mixing of skepticism and utter woo might be enough to cause a massive reaction, like matter and anti-…
oracknows | August 17, 2007So, after nearly two weeks of torturing myself trying to put together an R01-level grant on short notice and make it actually competitive, I'm finally free. The grant has been submitted (amazingly, the online submission process went through without a hitch), and, sleep-deprived but still hopped up on the Sudafed that kept the mucus membranes in my nasal passages from exploding outward at a high velocity, scattering watery goo everywhere.
Not a pretty sight when it happens, hence the Sudafed.
Fortunately, the pollen has subsided to the level where I am only mildly miserable, allowing my…
oracknows | August 10, 2007After over a year of doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I can't believe I've never come across this one before. Sometimes there's a bit of woo that comes my way that's so off the wall, so unexpected, the claims for which are so unrelated to reality that it startles even me. Moreover, unlike truly over-the-top woo like quantum homeopathy, DNA activation, or the SCIO, this one is utterly brilliant in the simplicity of its concept. It also makes me wonder about whether certain alties have a thing about feet. We know they have a thing about "detoxification" (without, of course, ever being able to…
oracknows | August 3, 2007Unfortunately, I was way too busy this week to come up with a new edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. However, there's still stuff to be mined from the ancient history of this blog, stuff that most of you, my readers, have probably not seen. This one, for instance, dates back nearly two years (September 2, 2005) and features this blog's mascot, everybody's favorite real colon cleansing product. In this installation, our mascot shows the woo being sold by a colon-cleansing altie for the product of his action that it is.
Rrrrr.
As you may recall, last month's appearance of everybody's favorite…
oracknows | July 27, 2007Time is important. Our life is measured in it, and there's no way to reverse it. How we use our allotted time on this planet is, of course, the most important question that anyone ever faces. But how to measure time? It all seems so obvious, doesn't it? You have years, which are divided into 365 days with a leap year every four years to make up for the fact that a year isn't exactly 365 days. You're good to go, at least for as long a period of time as anyone could expect. That's all you could expect from any calendar, right?
Wrong.
If you're a woo-meister, you know that a calendar could do so…
oracknows | July 20, 2007After over a year of delving into the world of woo, I had been starting to think that my ability to be surprised had disappeared. I mean, just think about it. After dealing with things like DNA activation, quantum homeopathy, the Healing Broom, Healing Sounds, and, of course, colon cleansing and liver flushing, I thought I had seen it all. However, another thing I've learned is that the most amusing woo is not necessarily the battiest. Sure the DNA activation guy and Lionel Milgrom can put out some woo that is so unbelievably out there, so bizarre, so amazing over the top that rational,…
oracknows | July 13, 2007Cool cool water.
Yes, that's what I really needed earlier this week, as the temperature almost hit 100° F in my neck of the woods. There's nothing like it after walking through the sauna-like conditions and losing my precious bodily fluids in the form of sweat. After all, I wouldn't want to get dehydrated, would I? And, heck, it's quite possible to die of dehydration. If you believe those nasty "conventional" medical authorities, it takes a healthy person with healthy kidneys a few days, give or take, to become sufficiently dehydrated to endanger his life, and medical science tells us that…
oracknows | July 6, 2007It was a rough day yesterday. I spent a long time in the O.R. It was one of those days that I couldn't figure out what happened. The number of operations that I had to do should have allowed me to finish operating by around 2 PM, leaving me time to do other things that needed to get done. But between delays in getting a patient back from nuclear medicine, long turnover times between cases, and a case that took me nearly two hours longer than it should have, it was well after 5 PM by the time I was done--and I still had a bunch of work to do. I'm not complaining; these things happen and there…
oracknows | June 29, 2007Here's something I've wanted to try for a while now. It'll either be wildly successful and popular, along the lines of You Might Be an Altie If..., or it'll be an utter failure, sinking into oblivion. Which one it ends up being will be up to you, O faithful readers of Your Friday Dose of Woo. The beauty of blogging, of course, is that if it fails next week I can pretend that it never happened and move on to (hopefully) greener pastures, my utter humiliation at publishing crap quickly forgotten, except, of course, living forever on the web.There are two other reasons that today is the perfect…
oracknows | June 22, 2007In my rigid, Western, scientific way of thinking, things generally have a beginning, a middle, and and end, the arrow of time marching relentlessly onward. However, it occurs to me that this is the very last edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo of its first year. Last June, when I started this, almost on a whim, I had no way of knowing how it would take on such a life of its own. Indeed, I fear that all the woo to which I subject myself on a weekly basis may be having an effect. I'm ceasing to see life as a straight line any more; such rigid thinking no longer suits me.
Instead, like the more…
oracknows | June 15, 2007Alright, now they've gone too far.
I can take a lot from woo-meisters. I can watch them claim that water has some sort of "memory" and that diluting a compound to nonexistence somehow seemingly by magic makes it more powerful and chuckle at their silliness. I can listen to them claim that by "alkalinizing your body" you can cure all manner of disease. I can even sit back and be somewhat amused when woo-meisters claim that making wine in a pyramid aligned to true north infuses it with pyramid power and makes it better or when they claim that drinking your own--shall we say?--reproductive…
oracknows | June 8, 2007As we continue our countdown to having reached one full year of woo (namely, the one year anniversary of Your Friday Dose of Woo), it's occurred to me that there's one form of woo that I've dealt with before, but haven't revisited. It's a bit of woo that's so monumentally silly that it's hard to believe that anyone can take it seriously, although I will admit up front that it is not quite as silly as homeopathy. It's close though. I'm talking, of course, about pH woo, the concept that pretty much every disease (or at least a whole heck of a lot of them) is caused by alterations in your blood…
oracknows | June 1, 2007Let's face it, energy woo can get boring. It's always "resonance this" and "vibration that," to the point that it all starts to sound the same. Such is the reason that I've become somewhat reluctant to take on more energy woo for Your Friday Dose of Woo. It takes a truly bizarre bit of energy woo to get me interested anymore, and this has me worried that either (1) I'm running out of woo (probably not a problem, as the Woo Folder is still pretty full) or (2) I need to diversify the woo, so to speak. This brings me to a little housekeeping about Your Friday Dose of Woo. It occurs to me that it…