medicine
oracknows | February 23, 2010How does homeopathy work? Heh.
Yes, this is in honor of my post earlier today.
I'm also appreciative that homeopaths have apparently diagnosed what's wrong with Parliament. Apparently it's emitting an angry purple aura.
oracknows | February 22, 2010Sometimes politicians actually get it right.
I know, I know, it makes me choke on my words to admit it, but sometimes politicians can actually get science right. I'm referring to something that happened in the U.K., yesterday, when the Science and Technology Select Committee delivered its verdict on homeopathy. Indeed, the Committee has gone so far as to call for the complete withdrawal of NHS funding and official licensing for homeopathy. The report is called Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, and I'll cut to the chase. This is what the report concluded:
By providing homeopathy on the NHS and…
palmd | February 22, 2010I've written previously about my decision not to assist patients in obtaining medical marijuana. My decision is based on my interpretation of the data and of medical ethics. This decision is independent of any opinion I may have about legalization.
But other doctors may see things differently. The data are clear to me, but the plausible nature of many of the claims made about marijuana make it anything but a no-brainer.
That's one of the reasons why a story out of New Mexico is disturbing. New Mexico has a medical marijuana program. Doctors who work for the Veterans' Administration are…
oracknows | February 22, 2010I'm beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn when it comes to the public zeitgeist regarding the anti-vaccine movement. Not only have there been a lot of stories lately that eschew the false "balance" that used to be so common in news stories about vaccines, but even comedy magazines are dumping on the anti-vaccine movement. For instance, Cracked.com has an article entitled 5 Things The Media Loves Pretending Are News. What's #5?
Let's ask the idiots about science:
When it comes to matters of opinion or personal beliefs, it is absolutely the duty of the news…
palmd | February 22, 2010Human beings are fundamentally narcissistic, and this narcissism can be antithetical to good science and good medicine. We place far too much confidence in our individual abilities to understand what happens to us, and we place far too much importance on our own experiences, inappropriately generalizing them. That's why science is so important in medicine---to avoid basing life-or-death decisions on something some guy thinks he might have heard once.
In my recent piece on medical marijuana in Forbes, commenters took me to task for what they perceived to be a host of errors in my reasoning…
oracknows | February 21, 2010I must admit that I never saw it coming. At least, I never saw it coming this fast and this dramatically. After all, this is a saga that has been going on for twelve solid years now, and it's an investigation that has been going on at least since 2004. I'm referring, of course, to that (possibly former) hero of the anti-vaccine movement, the man who is arguably the most responsible for suffering and death due to the resurgence of measles in the U.K. because of his role in frightening parents about the MMR vaccine.
I'm referring to the fall of Andrew Wakefield
Wakefield has shown an incredible…
oracknows | February 20, 2010The news is finally filtering out to the rest of the world. As I pointed out a few days ago Dr. Steven Laureys admitted that Rom Houben, the unfortunate victim of a car crash that left him in what had been diagnosed as a persistent vegetative state, was in fact not able to communicate through the woo known as facilitated communication. This came as no surprise to anyone who has followed FC over the years. In fact, what had come as a surprise is that Dr. Laureys could have been so easily taken in by pseudoscience that had been so thoroughly debunked in the 1990s. To his credit, though, after a…
oracknows | February 19, 2010On Wednesday, Steve Novella did a nice analysis of the recent study showing that signs of autism can be detected as early as six months of age. However, it was flawed by one clear misstatement, which was brought to his attention in the comments and which he then promptly corrected. Not that that stopped our old "friend" J.B. Handley, chief anti-vaccine propagandist for Generation Rescue from leaping into the fray with a goalpost-shifting, disingenuous, and insulting misrepresentation of the overall point of Steve's post. Par for the course for Mr. Handley.
Today, Steve has responded with a…
jstemwedel | February 19, 2010As promised, here's the video of the February 16, 2010 panel discussion at UCLA about the science and ethics of animal-based research, sponsored by Bruins for Animals and Pro-Test for Science.
UCLA Panel on Science and Ethics of Animal Research from Dario Ringach on Vimeo.
The video runs for about 2.5 hours, so you might want to grab a glass of water or a cup of coffee before you launch it.
oracknows | February 18, 2010What is it with cranks and trying to shut down criticism?
I know, I know. I've written about this before, but this week has been a banner week for a phenomenon that I consider a sine qua non of a crank or a quack, namely an intolerance of criticism. Seemingly, whenever a quack or a crank encounters serious criticism, the first reaction is almost never to try to argue based on facts, reason, and science, but rather to try to silence the person doing the criticizing. The tactics are many and varied, but the end goal is always the same: Suppress the criticism by any means necessary. The very…
palmd | February 18, 2010There are plenty of bloggers who consider themselves to be serving a larger social purpose. How much of a service they actually provide depends very much on your own ideology. I'm sure RedState thinks they are providing vital, timely political analysis, while I think they're a waste of bandwidth. Similarly, there are countless quacks offering all sorts of bad medical advice (in fact, one of Pal's Laws is that the internet is 90% porn and 10% bad medical advice). Some of this bad medical advice serves an active "anti-public health" purpose, discouraging vaccination or claiming that the…
oracknows | February 18, 2010Last night, it came to light from a posting on the Thoughtful House Yahoo! discussion group that Andrew Wakefield has apparently resigned from Thoughtful House. I have yet to see confirmation anywhere, although Brian Deer has chimed in that this comes as no surprise to him and that he suspects that Dr. Arthur Krigsman, Anyssa Ryland, and Jane Johnson are behind Wakefield's ouster. However, more interesting is this comment from Liz Ditz. In it, she points out a couple of interesting bits of background.
Tidbit #1 from 2008:
In 2007 alone, Thoughtful House saw 1,500 new patient requests -- or…
oracknows | February 17, 2010I'm hearing this from multiple sources, who are forwarding me this message from the Yahoo! Thoughtful House Group:
Dr. Wakefield has resigned from Thoughtful House
The needs of the children we serve must always come first. All of us at Thoughtful House are grateful to Dr. Wakefield for the valuable work he has done here. We fully support his decision to leave Thoughtful House in order to make sure that the controversy surrounding the recent findings of the General Medical Council does not interfere with the important work that our dedicated team of clinicians and researchers is doing on…
oracknows | February 17, 2010I happened to be listening to the Holocaust Denial On Trial podcast yesterday, specifically this episode which is a recording of a speech given by Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt about Holocaust denial and her experiences being sued for libel in Britain by arch Holocaust denier David Irving, who, much like the British Chiropractic Association taking advantage of the U.K.'s highly plaintiff-friendly libel laws to sue Simon Singh for libel now, took advantage of those same libel laws back in the late 1990s to sue Deborah Lipstadt. In the speech, she takes a position that I have argued on…
oracknows | February 16, 2010I realize that Chris Mooney is a polarizing figure here on the ol' ScienceBlogs, but I have to give him props for doing a damned fine job handling questions about vaccines, autism, and Andrew Wakefield's utterly discredited 1998 Lancet study, which was retracted by the Lancet's editors last week:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
I wish I could say the same thing for Nancy Snyderman. Although she was mostly right, I cringed--big time--when she insisted that there are no studies that show a link between vaccines and autism. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!…
oracknows | February 16, 2010Remember Mark and David Geier?
I wouldn't be surprised if regular readers may have forgotten about this father-son tag team of anti-vaccine lunacy and autism woo. After all, I haven't written about them since journalist Trine Tsouderos did her expose of their "Lupron protocol" for the Chicago Tribune nine months ago. Long time readers, however, will remember the Geiers. They were one of the very first autism-related topics I wrote about after joining ScienceBlogs four years ago, when I wrote about them in a little ditty I called Why not just castrate them? The reason that I gave my post the…
grrlscientist | February 15, 2010tags: Scientia Pro Publica, Science for the People, biology, evolution, medicine, earth science, behavioral ecology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, blog carnival
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Welcome to the 21st edition of Scientia Pro Publica, the blog carnival devoted to nurturing and encouraging an online community of blog writers who communicate with the public about science, environment and medicine. Since it was the 201st anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, I think it is important to…
oracknows | February 15, 2010I've been a bad, bad organizer.
Poor Martin went through all that work to put together another bang up Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle (the 130th, to be precise), and I didn't publicize it. Well, hopefully better late than never. Go. Read. Learn.
Then don't forget that less than two weeks hence, on February 25, the 131st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle will be held at Providentia. Guidelines for submission can be found here. So start getting your skeptical blogging going to produce yet another great edition of the Skeptics' Circle, which, believe it or not, has been running five years now.…
oracknows | February 15, 2010I feel really, really good today.
The reason? Simple Orac has annoyed Jim Carrey enough to ban him on Twitter. The exchange went something like this. For the first time in a while, I was perusing Twitter (I have a really hard time keeping my Insolence to 140 characters; so I only check my Twitter account maybe once or twice a week) when I saw someone mention a couple of Tweets by Jim Carrey that went like this:
Dr. Andrew Wakefield's studies r being unfairly supressed. His newest vacs vs unvacs study MUST BE PUBLISHED. RT "Show Me The Monkeys!" ;^)
Folks, it's a REAL STUDY of chimps subjected…
grrlscientist | February 14, 2010tags: food, health, healthy eating, healthy food, cooking, portion size, obesity, overweight, Jamie Oliver, TEDTalks, streaming video
In this affecting video, TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver shares powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., and makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.
Jamie Oliver is transforming the way we feed ourselves, and our children. Jamie Oliver has been drawn to the kitchen since he was a child working in his father's pub-restaurant. He showed not only a precocious culinary talent but also a passion for creating (and…