Friday Woo
oracknows | January 19, 2007I admit it.
I'm a gadget freak. I sometimes think I should have gone into radiology. If you're a radiologist and work with MRI, CT scans, PET scanners, and numerous other cool gadgets. Of course, you also have to sit in dark rooms in the basement of the hospital and stare at films for several years to learn the basics of reading simple radiographs in order to qualify to work with the cool toys, not to that you also have to learn how to do barium enemas and other similarly unpleasant tests. Other times, I think that I should have become a radiation oncologist. Radiation oncology is a great…
oracknows | January 12, 2007The other day, as is my wont every week, I was perusing my Folder of Woo, the folder on my computer in which I keep a bunch of URLs leading to many potential targets for Your Friday Dose of Woo, looking for this week's victim. I had one all picked out, too, but for some reason it just wasn't getting the woo-inator going enough to inspire me to do what is expected every week. Not that it wasn't good woo, even really good woo. It just wasn't great woo, and YFDoW just hasn't been around long enough for me to settle for anything less than the greatest, finest, tastiest woo just yet. Or maybe it…
oracknows | January 7, 2007The name of this band is damned near perfect:
No, not the Shut-Ups (although that's a pretty cool band name, too). Anyone who reads this blog would know that I'm referring to Down With The Woo.
I wonder if their music is any good. If so, they could become the blog band of Respectful Insolenceâ¢. (or at least of Your Friday Dose of Woo, although most people seem to actually like Friday Woo). Fortunately, in that interest, I was informed of their MySpace page, which says:
Up from the ashes of cult heroes, Heros Severum. Powered by Macintosh. DWTW is a live production experiment. Every show is…
oracknows | January 5, 2007It's back.
Yes, I was wondering what would be the best way to start out a brand new year of Your Friday Dose of Woo. Once again, as is all too unfortunately the case, there was an embarrassment of riches, a veritable cornucopia of woo out there, each one seemingly just as worthy of Orac's loving attention as the other. And, after having taken a week off from this, there was even a backup of woo. (I wonder if a little cleansing might be in order to relieve the backup.) Then it occurred to me. I started YFDoW with a very special treatment of some truly spectacular woo known as quantum…
oracknows | December 29, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 9, 2006 and seems to fit in with the whole "Friday Dose of Woo" thing; so I'll repost it as such. Enjoy!.
I was…
oracknows | December 24, 2006This one's too good for me to ignore even on vacation. It's the perfect gift for the skeptical.
Remember the Friday Dose of Woo in which I had a little fun with the whole concept of trepanning (drilling a hole in your head to "improve blood flow")? Well guess what?
The trepanation guy (Randall W. Haws) has shown up right here in the comments of that post. And he thinks that I (and those of you who chimed in) are truly, truly misguided, not to mention hypocrites. He's also pointing out how he is "free" and we're all still "imprisoned."
I can't think of a better blog Christmas present. Well, OK…
oracknows | December 22, 2006Another week in the can.
It's been an eventful one, with prizes won, memories revived, and a couple of pesky Holocaust deniers descending to spew their bile. Hard as it is to believe, the year's almost over and the holidays are upon us. You're probably like me, tired of the Christmas carols, commercials urging you to buy, buy, buy since late October, coupled with the frenzy of preparing for the season. After all that, Christmas is only four days away. Perhaps, like me, you would like to take a little break. And, as always, I know just the thing.
It's time once again for a little bit of tasty…
oracknows | December 15, 2006This week sucked.
OK, it was the last two or three days that sucked, but they were bad enough to ruin the whole week. The only reason my blogging didn't reflect this is because most of the posts over the last couple of days were actually written earlier this week, and the true magnitude of this week's suckitude didn't hit me until yesterday. Suffice it to say that my lab minions have caused me considerable aggravation and angst this week by doing something really, really dumb, a problem whose effect was amplified by the response of a colleague. (That's all I'm going to say about it.) To top…
oracknows | December 8, 2006Ever since I started Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) back in June, I had always intended that someday I wanted to expand this loving deconstruction of various forms of woo beyond just medical woo and quackery. True, having a little fun with woo that claims to treat disease or restore health is something that I've gotten pretty good at. You may wonder why I would want to move beyond medicine occasionally. After all, there's no shortage of medical woo to deal with every Friday, and I'll almost certainly return to it next week.
Sometimes a skeptic needs a change of pace, and this is one of…
oracknows | December 1, 2006It's been five months since I first started Your Friday Dose of Woo. I started it on a whim, after wondering if I should have a Friday feature, as so many other ScienceBloggers do (Friday Cephalopod, Friday Sprog Blogging, The Friday Fermentable, among others). In those five months, this thing has taken on a life of its own, producing woo more woo-ey than any that I had ever encountered before, woo like DNA activation, quantum homeopathy, Dr. Emoto's water woo, spiritually guided surgery, detoxifying boots, and the global orgasm. Sometimes the woo had religious overtones; sometimes it abused…
oracknows | November 24, 2006For the holidays, I thought I'd include a brief little bit of woo that seems not quite extensive enough for a full treatment in Your Friday Dose of Woo but is nonetheless a tasty woo morsel for your edification that fits in with the usual Thanksgiving theme of overindulgence in various foods and the deleterious effect such overindulgence can have on one's waistline. Here's one that I've never heard of before, namely ear stapling for weight loss:
Marie Fallaw says she lost 83 pounds in six months simply by "stapling" her ears.
The Mississippi entrepreneur, owner of Staple Lean LLC, has…
oracknows | November 24, 2006It may be Thanksgiving weekend here in the States, and fellow ScienceBloggers PZ and Ed may be getting sniping at each other over Larry Moran's rather intemperate comments. (Can't we all just get along, guys, at least for the holidays anyway?). Worse, this kerfluffle is threatening to suck in other fellow ScienceBloggers Mike Dunford, John Wilkins, John Lynch, and Chad Orzel, as well.
You know, this whole thing reminds me a lot of political and religious arguments that used to break out among my family sometimes during holiday gatherings. Let's hope the results of this one, like the results…
oracknows | November 17, 2006Given my love of science and advocacy of evidence-based medicine, people may have come to the erroneous conclusion that I hate all woo. Nothing could be further from the truth. I just want medical woo to be subject to the same scientific testing as conventional medicine, because I believe that there should not even be a difference between "alternative medicine" and medicine. There's just medicine that has good scientific, clinical, and epidemiological evidence to suggest it works, and that's all I care about. Heck, if someone produced good scientific evidence that there was something to…
oracknows | November 10, 2006Let's get one thing straight.
There's just no way on earth that I can imagine topping last week's Your Friday Dose of Woo. I can only be as good as my source material lets me be (well, maybe a bit better), and Toby Alexander and his "DNA Activation" represented such unbelievably potent, bizarre, and concentrated woo that I can't imagine that I'll find its like anytime soon again, much less find something that tops it. Even if I were to find woo more potent than Toby's, it would probably rend the fabric of the space-time continuum. Of course, given his "multidimensional spectra of DNA…
oracknows | November 3, 2006There are times when the struggle to keep cranking out Your Friday Dose of Woo every week starts to get to me. No, it's not because I don't enjoy putting together these little light-hearted but pointed analyses of some of the strangest woo that I've come across. Believe me, many times it's the highlight of my blogging week. It's just that, now that I've been doing this a while, no matter how hard I try to put something together the weekend before, so as to be ahead of the game, somehow I almost never quite manage to do it. Thus, all too frequently I end up writing away late Thursday night…
oracknows | October 27, 2006No, I'm not talking about "Iron Justice," a guy who regularly posts to misc.health.alternative and seems obsessed with iron metabolism as the be-all and end-all of health and disease, with a particular affinity for iron overload as the cause of seemingly all disease, although he might make an amusing target at some point in the future. This time, it's something different. This week, as every week since inaugurating Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was sitting back, contemplating what flavor of woo I should have a little fun with. As is often the case, it was hard. No, it wasn't hard because of lack…
oracknows | October 20, 2006I had considered putting Your Friday Dose of Woo on hiatus this week. It seemed rather superfluous. After all, for whatever reason, whatever confluence of strangeness, this blog has read like Your Friday Dose of Woo for nearly the entire week. I mean, come on. I started out fisking that über-woo Deepak Chopra on Monday, and then, not satisfied with one deconstruction of Choprawoo, I took him on again on Tuesday! Then, not content that enough woo had been dealt with on the blog this week, for whatever reason, yesterday I decided to write about what is arguably the ultimate in woo (at least in…
oracknows | October 13, 2006I tried not to write about the altie obsession with "detoxification" again. Really, I did. It gets repetitive, and I don't want Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) to become to repetitive. Of course, a certain amount of repetitiveness is unavoidable, given that there are only a few major themes running through medical woo. First, there's the belief that "toxins" (rarely specified and almost never with any hard evidence linking them to any specific diseases) are causing disease and that you--yes, you!--need to be "detoxified," whether this "detoxification" is supposedly accomplished through enemas…
oracknows | October 6, 2006I've said it before, and I'll say it again: There's a reason that I don't get seriously into blogging about politics that much, and this week reminded me why bigtime. For one thing, political bloggers are a dime a dozen, meaning that you have to be really, really good to distinguish yourself from the chattering hordes. (Or you have to be rabidly right or left wing.) Also, I like to think that I've carved out a nice unique niche in the blogosphere for myself in the world of skepticism, critical thinking, and the debunking of quackery. Were I to wander too far astray from those topics that my…
oracknows | September 29, 2006Earlier this week, I thought that I had identified this week's woo target. I told myself that this was it, that this was the one for this week. I even started writing it the other day, because, as much as I try to get this thing done early, somehow I always seem to be writing it at 11 PM Thursday nights. I thought this week would be different.
I was mistaken.
The reason that I was wrong was because I came across a link that was so amusing, so full of outrageously concentrated woo, that I just couldn't restrain myself from throwing my old topic to the wayside (well, not exactly; I can always…