Infertility
oracknows | February 24, 2016I've written several times over the years about the overblown claims of harm attributed, largely—but not exclusively—by cranks, to cell phone radiation. It's been claimed that radiation from cell phones can cause brain tumors (there's no convincing evidence that this is true), breast cancer (the evidence for these claims is so incredibly flimsy—and featured by Dr. Oz, to boot!—that this is not a credible claim), and a wide variety of other health issues. Indeed, if you believe the cranks, the mobile phone companies are the equivalent of tobacco companies denying that their products cause…
oracknows | November 13, 2014
Of the many lies and myths about vaccines that stubbornly persist despite all evidence showing them not only to be untrue but to be risibly, pseudoscientifically untrue, among whose number are myths that vaccines cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, and a syndrome that so resembles shaken baby syndrome (more correctly called abusive head trauma) that shaken baby syndrome is a misdiagnosis for vaccine injury, the lie that vaccines are being used for population control is one of the most persistent. In this myth, vaccines are not designed to protect the populations of impoverished…
oracknows | November 25, 2013Acupuncture is quackery. This cannot be repeated often enough, and, in fact, over the last several months I've developed a tendency to start all my posts on acupuncture by making sure to remind everyone that it is quackery. The reasons are many-fold. For one thing, the concepts behind acupuncture are based on the claim that somehow, placing little needles into the body along various lines known as meridians, somehow "redirects" the flow of vital life "energy" to healing effect. Never mind that this energy, called "qi," has never been detected, measured, or characterized, nor have have "…
oracknows | August 8, 2013Whenever I take a day off from blogging, as I did yesterday because I was too busy going out with my wife on Wednesday night to celebrate my birthday, I not infrequently find an embarrassment of riches to blog about the next day. Sometimes it's downright difficult to decide what to write about. So it was as I sat down last night to do a bit of blogging. I briefly considered writing about Suzanne Somers leaping into the fray to defend Stanislaw Burzynski, and maybe I still will. On the other hand, it's standard boilerplate Burzynski apologetics, not even very interesting; so maybe I won't.…
rskloot | March 2, 2009
The other day, the NY Times ran a story called "Picture Emerging on Genetic Risks of IVF. It reported on a new Centers for Disease Control study that found that children conceived through the most common infertility treatments had a slightly increased risk of several birth defects, including cleft palate and septal heart defects.  believe this is one of the largest studies looking into the connection between Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and birth defects, but it's not  the first. Â
Way back in 2003, I wrote a story for Popular Science called "Sally Has Two Mommies + One Daddy…