Homeopathy
oracknows | June 26, 2011It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll post two, one older, one more recent, but both about the same topic. This one's from 2007, which means that if you haven't been reading at least four years it's new to you.
A common refrain among…
oracknows | June 3, 2011It's been a rough week. No, it hasn't been rough here on the blog; personally I think I've managed to serve up heaping' helpings of the usual expected Insolence--and then some--if I do say so myself. Rather, it's been a bit rough at the old job. Ah, well, it can't all be sweetness and light. Fortunately, there's always some woo to lighten the mood. In this case, it came from, of all places, P.Z. Myers, who took a break from writing about biology, cephalopods, and atheism and led me to some quackery I hadn't seen before. Well, not exactly. It's definitely quackery that I've seen before many,…
oracknows | May 25, 2011Many are the times I've referred to homeopathy as The One Quackery To Rule Them All. Because homeopathic remedies diluted greater than 12 C (12 serial hundred-fold dilutions) have been diluted more than Avagadro's number, they are incredibly unlikely to have even a single molecule of starting compound in them. That makes them water. Given that the vast majority of homeopathic remedies are, in fact, only water, they are the perfect quackery, and any effects due to homeopathy are nonspecific and placebo effects. More recently, I've pointed out that, because you can't have naturopathy without…
oracknows | May 22, 2011I get it. Seriously, I really do. Advertising is a deal with the devil. I understand that and have come to accept it--to a point. For example, I can (sort of) tolerate ads for Cancer Treatment Centers of America showing up on ScienceBlogs; I even understand that outside of those of us who promote science-based medicine CTCA isn't considered to be that bad. However, ads for homeopathy really, really irritated me, as I mentioned on Friday. It gets even worse than that, though. As if ads for homeopathy and human growth hormone anti-aging quackery weren't enough, what popped up earlier to mock…
oracknows | May 20, 2011Apparently something's going on here on ScienceBlogs. It's something that I don't like at all. You, my readers, have been informing me of it. Oddly enough, it also jibes with potential blogging material that appeared on that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post. You'll see what I'm talking about in a moment. Suffice it to say that it is not a confluence that makes me happy. It's not even a confluence that amuses me. Rather, it's a confluence that should never, ever happen. But happen it has.
It began with advertisements that have been popping up. Unfortunately, after a long…
oracknows | April 4, 2011It figures.
I don't know if it's confirmation bias or not, but it seems that every time I go away on a trip, some juicy bit of blog fodder pops up. So, right here, right now, while I'm at the AACR meeting soaking up the latest and greatest in cancer science, inevitably someone posts something that normally would provoke--nay, demand--an Orac-ian deconstruction full of the usual Insolence. So what is it this time?
Dana Ullman.
Yes, everybody's favorite homeopath for whom no science is too settled to twist and homeopathy and homeopathic "thinking" are in fact responsible for much of medical…
oracknows | March 7, 2011Over the years, I've pointed out just how horrible British libel laws are. If there is a set of laws more designed to be used and abused by the wealthy to silence criticism, it's British libel laws. Indeed, I was pointing out the travesty that is British libel law in the context of David Irving's use of it to try to silence Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt years before Simon Singh became a cause celebre in the skeptical community after the British Chiropractic Association sued him on the flimsiest of grounds. Fortunately, the BCA lost, but only after coming very close to winning and costing…
oracknows | February 27, 2011Naturopathy has been a recurrent topic on this blog. The reasons should be obvious. Although homeopathy is the one woo to rule them all in the U.K. and much of Europe, here in the U.S. homeopathy is not nearly as big a deal. Arguably, some flavor of naturopathy is the second most prevalent "alternative medical system" here, after chiropractic of course, and perhaps duking it out with traditional Chinese medicine, although naturopathy does embrace TCM as part of the armamentarium of dubious medical systems that it uses. In any case, some sixteen states and five Canadian provinces license…
oracknows | February 25, 2011It's Friday. That means I'm in the mood for something more amusing. In the past, I used to use Fridays to have some fun with some particularly outrageous bit of woo, such as quantum homeopathy or DNA activation. Lately, I haven't done Your Friday Dose of Woo nearly as often as I used to, but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate good woo when I see it. However, some bits of craziness just aren't suitable for YFDoW not so much because they aren't crazy enough but because of the deadly seriousness of the intent or because they lack that light-hearted bit of looniness that characterizes the…
oracknows | February 6, 2011Lest I be left out of the fun, I can't help but point out that over the weekend the Amazing One himself, James Randi, issued a challenge to homeopathy manufacturers and retail pharmacies that sell homeopathy, in particular large national chains like Walgreens and CVS and large national chains that include pharmacies in their stores, such as Walmart and Target. This was done in conjunction with the 10:23 Challenge, which is designed to demonstrate that homeopathy is nonsense. All over the world, skeptics and supporters of science-based medicine gathered to engage in overdoses of homeopathic…
oracknows | January 28, 2011Sometimes a comment in the comment thread after one of my posts ends up turning into the inspiration for another post. This is especially likely to happen if I respond to that comment and end up writing a comment of myself that seems way too good to waste, forever buried in the comments where, as soon as the commenting on the post dies down, it remains, unread again. So it was after my post on the "integration" of quackery into academic medical centers. In that post, I applied some of my inimitable not-so-Respectful Insolence to a deal between Georgetown University, what should be a bastion…
oracknows | January 17, 2011Something amazing happened on Friday. Unfortunately, I didn't get to blog it as soon as I would have liked because (1) it happened on Canadian TV and the video wasn't available to anyone outside of Canada until it showed up on YouTube and (2) Craig Willougby's changing his mind about Andrew Wakefield really did gobsmack me to the point that I had to blog about it, so rare is it for someone who used to accept pseudoscience to have the courage and intellectual honesty to admit publicly that he is changing his mind. Still, even though it's three days later, I didn't want to let this pass,…
oracknows | January 14, 2011I'm tired.
Well, not exactly. I think I'm just suffering a case of what I like to call "anti-vax burnout." It's been a busy couple of weeks on the antivaccine front, given the new set of revelations about Andrew Wakefield, including even more detail about the nature of the scientific fraud he committed and previously untold information regarding just how extensive his business plans were to profit from the MMR scare that his fraudulent science was instrumental in launching in the U.K. Regular readers know that, from time to time, when the news about the anti-vaccine movement is coming fast…
oracknows | January 4, 2011As a blogger, every so often I come across a link, file it away, and then when I look through my link collection looking for topics to blog about I rediscover the link but totally forget where I got it from. This is just one of these times. However, since it's less than three weeks until the event being promoted, I thought it might be entertaining to write about it. Unfortunately, it requires revisiting a topic that I've written about a few times before, albeit not recently. I'm referring to the American Medical Student Association and its embrace of woo, i which it has even gone so far as…
oracknows | November 30, 2010Homeopathy is among the most ridiculous of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine therapies." I realize that I've made this point over and over and over again, but it bears repeating because, no matter how often homeopathy is shown to be utter and complete woo, homeopaths always seem to bounce right back, Gish galloping between the bullets of science in order to repeat the same unsupportable claims, nonsense about the "memory of water," and comparisons of homepathy to vaccines. Another reason that homeopathy is an excellent example to discuss is because--well, let's face it--it's…
oracknows | November 23, 2010They call it the Nobel disease.
Linus Pauling is the prototypical example. A brilliant chemist who won two Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, in his later years Pauling became convinced that high dose vitamin C was a highly effective treatment for cancer and the common cold and, expanding upon that, came to believe in the quackery that is orthomolecular medicine. As a result, Pauling's reputation was tainted for all time, and he became known more for his crankery than his successes. Since his death, Pauling's successors have continued to chase his dream with minimal…
oracknows | November 20, 2010Silly Crispian, any homeopath will tell you that this isn't a valid test of homeopathy because you didn't adequately succuss at each step. (Of course, then there's the issue of succussing it against a Bible, which Hahnemann himself favored.) I also would have recommended using a different pipette for each dilution to make sure there was minimal to no carry-over. Of course, this latter comment has nothing to do with the validity of homeopathy (which has none) but the possibility of falsely elevating the level of residual piss at each dilution.
One wonders what else homeopathic piss could…
oracknows | November 18, 2010Homeopathy remains the perfect quackery because it is nothing but water. Even homeopaths seem to recognize this implicitly. If they did not, then there would be no need for all the mental mastubation they engage in to imbue their magic water with "memory," such that, as Tim Minchin so famously put it, it "remembers" all the good stuff it's been in contact with but forgets all the poo that's been in it. Truly, it is magic. Alternatively, homepaths will try to claim that the process of dilution and vigorous shaking between each serial dilution (or, as homepaths refer to it, succussion) somehow…
oracknows | November 14, 2010Yesterday my wife and I were doing a bit of shopping for various household supplies at one of our favorite stores, our local Target. Having already been disturbed by the sheer volume of Christmas decorations and items on sale two weeks before Thanksgiving, I was even more disturbed to see this:
Yep, it's everywhere. Oscillococcinum. A homeopathic treatment, quackery right there on the shelves. The only thing good I could think of to say about this is that it's absolutely true that this remedy is, as advertised on the package, non-drowsy, with no interactions with other drugs, and without…
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…