medicine
oracknows | July 24, 2014
"Team aerobic" by Berner Kantonalturnfest 2010 (Utzenstorf, Bätterkinden, Kirchberg, Koppigen).
Original uploader was Equilibrium suisse at de.wikipedia - Transferred from de.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Boteas using CommonsHelper.
(Original text: http://www.ktf2010.ch). Licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0-de
via Wikimedia Commons.
Few people know better than I that times are tough in the world of biomedical research. It’s been eight or nine years since the “hard landing” that occurred after the near doubling of the NIH budget that occurred between FY1998 and FY2003, a crash that was…
oracknows | July 23, 2014If there’s one characteristic of supporters of dubious medicine, it’s that they detest criticism. Whereas your average skeptic might not like criticism—sensitivity to criticism being a human trait and all—science- and evidence-based criticism tends to drive dubious medical practitioners (and, I might add, promoters of various other forms of woo) into paroxysms of anger. Not infrequently, because they can’t refute such criticisms with science and evidence, they respond by lashing out, by going on the attack. That lashing out can take many forms, from simply writing abusive posts about their…
pharyngula | July 22, 2014New genetic disorders pop up all the time -- each one represents a child who may face incredible challenges, or even be doomed to death. A child named Bertrand exhibited some serious symptoms -- profound developmental disabilities -- shortly after he was born, and no one could figure out what was wrong with him. So they took advantage of 21st century biotechnology and sequenced his genome, and the genome of both of his parents, and asked what novel mutations the child carried.
For years, sequencing was too expensive for common use—in 2001, the cost of sequencing a single human genome was…
oracknows | July 22, 2014
Only really long time readers will remember this, but back in the day (June 2005, to be exact), I discovered Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his antivaccine nuttery when he published his epically bad piece of antivaccine conspiracy mongering, Deadly Immunity, both in Salon.com and Rolling Stone (the latter of which doubled down on it a few years later by reposting it). My deconstruction of the logical fallacies, errors of science and fact, and just general silliness of Kennedy’s article was one of the first times I was ever really “noticed” in the blogosphere. Since then, every so often, or so…
oracknows | July 18, 2014
Of all the alternative medical systems out there, chiropractic is one of the oddest. Unlike many of the others, it has a modicum of plausibility, at least for back problems due to musculoskeletal strains. After all, the science-based specialty of physical therapy uses spinal manipulation to treat back problems. Of course, the big difference between chiropractic and physical therapy is that chiropractic is based on a delusion, namely the concept of subluxations. To science-based specialties, a subluxation a painful partial dislocation. This is different from a chiropractic subluxation,…
oracknows | July 16, 2014
One of the most common criticisms launched at defenders of science-based medicine by believers in pseudoscience and quackery is that we are “pharma shills.” The assumption, or so it would seem, is that no one would defend science, reason, and medicine unless he were paid off by pharmaceutical, chemical, and/or agricultural companies. The further assumption is that, in contrast to our greedy grasping selves, they are not motivated by such base concerns as money. That is their self-image, that of pure-hearted warriors against evil, the evil being big pharma, big agriculture, big chemical,…
oracknows | July 10, 2014Three months ago, I wrote about how the Cleveland Clinic had recently opened a clinic that dispensed herbal medicine according to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practice. As regular readers might expect, I was not particularly impressed or approving of this particular bit of infiltration of quackademic medicine into a major, generally well-respected academic medical center, particularly given some of the amazingly pseudoscientific treatments espoused by the naturopath who was running the clinic. I also pointed out that, although herbalism is the most plausible (or perhaps I should say the…
oracknows | July 9, 2014Today, I'm winging my way to sunny Las Vegas. Yes, in the middle of summer, when southern Nevada's weather is most like an oven, I will be there. The reason? I'll be doing a workshop and a panel with fellow supporters of science-based medicine at The Amazing Meeting.
I don't know how many of my readers will be there, but if you're there and see me hanging out at the Del Mar or in the hall between sessions, feel free to introduce yourself. For everyone else, I guess we'll have to consider this an open thread. Don't worry. I plan on doing some blogging while I'm away, but it might be more…
oracknows | July 8, 2014Over the years I’ve been studying science versus pseudoscience, medicine vs. quackery, reason versus crankery, I’ve noticed one thing. The cranks, pseudoscientists, and quacks of the world have a hard time dealing with legitimate criticism. Now, I know I sometimes get a bit—shall we say?—frisky with my criticisms. OK, obnoxious. I have, however, mellowed considerably since the dawn of this blog, as any reading of posts from the early days (or even not-so-early days) will confirm. Sure, I do occasionally still reach back into that reservoir of the “Insolence” that got me started, but I’d never…
oracknows | July 6, 2014Lawrence Solomon appears to be a rising star in the antivaccine movement. I started taking notice of him a couple of months ago, spewing classic long-refuted antivaccine talking points with the enthusiasm of a newbie who thinks he’s the first one to have thought of them and the arrogance of ignorance of a convert who has no clue that he’s spewing complete and total bollocks. Lately, he’s been spewing that bollocks in various places, including his own website, the Financial Post, that wretched hive of antivaccine scum and quackery, The Huffington Post (a.k.a. HuffPost), and, a week ago, The…
oracknows | July 3, 2014This is a post about homeopathic quackery. But I repeat myself.
Those of you who’ve been readers here for a while have no doubt encountered Dana Ullman. He’s been popping up from time to time as a topic of this blog for many years now, almost to the very beginning, when he began spewing the most unbelievably silly and pseudoscientific defenses of homeopathy. Darwin had his bulldog in the form of a man named Thomas Huxley. Unfortunately, Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, has his very own pit bull 200 years later in the form of Dana Ullman. That is not a compliment, nor is it meant…
oracknows | July 3, 2014Our regularly scheduled post will go live later this morning. In the meantime, this is a public service announcement...with GUITAR! (Oh, wait.)
As you recall, last week, the FDA inexplicably decided to lift the partial clinical hold on Stanislaw Burzynski's bogus clinical trials of antineoplastons, which he's used since the 1990s as a pretext to charge huge sums of money for "case management fees" to patients for a treatment whose efficacy he has never demonstrated. Yesterday, the Center for Inquiry laid in, and has sent a letter to legislators:
“We are frankly stunned to hear that the…
oracknows | June 30, 2014One of the most depressing things I regularly write about is, of course, the antivaccine movement. However, nearly as depressing to me is to watch the steady march of what I view as medical pseudoscience or even outright quackery into what should be bastions of science-based medicine, namely academic medical centers. As I’ve discussed many times before, it’s gotten to the point where a medical school, in order to remain accredited, has to teach a certain amount of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), or, as it’s increasingly called, “integrative medicine” (or, as I like…
oracknows | June 27, 2014Yesterday’s post was just too depressing to contemplate and even more depressing to write. It was a total downer after seen the awesomeness that was John Oliver gloriously skewering America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz. That’s why I think it would be good to finish this week on an amusing note. Well, it would be amusing if it weren’t for my knowledge that the woman who wrote the post I’m about to “analyze” has an autistic child and is subjecting that child to quackery. Actually, that’s true of pretty much every woman who blogs at the wretched hive of scum and autism biomed quackery where this post…
oracknows | June 25, 2014It's hard for me to believe that it's been almost three years since I first started taking an interest in the Houston cancer doctor and Polish expat Stanislaw Burzynski. Three long years, but that's less than one-twelfth the time that Burzynski has been actually been administering an unproven cancer treatment known as antineoplastons (ANPs), a drug that has not been FDA-approved, to patients, which he began doing in 1977. Yes, back when Burzynski got started administering ANPs to patients, I was just entering high school, the Internet as we know it did not exist yet, just a much smaller…
oracknows | June 24, 2014If there's one thing that antivaccine activists share in common, it's the passionate (and as yet unproven) belief that "something" out there in the environment caused the "autism epidemic." Usually, that "something" thought to be vaccines, but with the utter failure of the vaccine-autism hypothesis to the point where it is considered soundly refuted, antivaccinationists have gotten a bit more—shall we say?—creative. Now it's something in the environment. Sometimes it's mercury, despite the utter lack of evidence that mercury in vaccines is even remotely linked to autism. Sometimes it's…
oracknows | June 24, 2014If this looks a bit familiar to some of you, let's just say that it's grant crunch time again. This should be over after today. I hope.
In the meantime, one of the difficult things about science-based medicine is determining what is and isn't quackery. While it is quite obvious that modalities such as homeopathy, acupuncture, reflexology, craniosacral therapy, Hulda Clark's "zapper," the Gerson therapy and Gonzalez protocol for cancer, and reiki (not to mention every other "energy healing" therapy) are the rankest quackery, there are lots of treatments that are harder to classify. Much of the…
pharyngula | June 23, 2014This is an excellent piece on that quack, Dr Oz, by John Oliver. The first 5 minutes is spent mocking the fraud, but then, the last ten minutes are all about the real problem: the evisceration of the FDA's regulatory power over supplements, thanks to Senators Hatch and Harkin.
OK, there is a silly bit at the end where they show that you can pander to your audience without lying to them about the health benefits of magic beans, but still -- let's beef up the FDA, all right?
oracknows | June 23, 2014After Dr. Oz's very bad week last week, it's wonderful to see John Oliver take on Dr. Oz in a very long segment on his show Last Week Tonight With John Oliver:
Hilarious.
oracknows | June 23, 2014I’ll admit it: I’m a bit of a beer snob. I make no bones about it, I like my beer, but I also like it to be good beer, and, let’s face it, beer brewed by large industrial breweries seldom fits the bill. To me, most of the beer out being sold in the U.S., particularly beer made by Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors can easily be likened to cold piss from horses with kidney disease (you need protein to get beer foam, you know), only without the taste. I have to be mighty desperate and thirsty before I will partake of such swill. I will admit that there is one exception, namely Blue Moon, which is…