medicine
pharyngula | April 21, 2014You know what is really impressing me about Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos? That he doesn't hesitate to draw connections between science and how we live our lives — there is an implicit understanding that science has become fundamental to how we see the universe. Last night's episode was no exception. What started as an explanation for how we know the age of the earth (4.55 billion years), as established by the rigorous measurement of the ratio of lead to uranium in meteorites by Claire Patterson, became an exploration of health and the misuse of science, as personified by Robert Kehoe.…
oracknows | April 20, 2014This might look somewhat familiar to people, but I have a good excuse. Yesterday was Easter, and, although by no stretch of the imagination can I be accused of being particularly religious, we still did have family to visit. Add to that the fact that I have a two talks to give today that as of Friday night I hadn't even started working on (OK, two versions of the same talk, which makes it perhaps 1.5 talks), and a little—shall we say?—creative recycling is in order. Even so, if you don't follow the other locales where my written meanderings may be found, it'll still be new to you. It all…
oracknows | April 18, 2014For some reason, I was really beat last night, and, given that this weekend is a holiday for a large proportion of the country (if, perhaps, not for a large proportion of my readership), I don't feel too bad about slacking off a bit by mentioning a couple of short bits that I wanted to blog about but didn't get around to. And what better topic to blog about on Good Friday than the exact opposite of what this Easter season is supposed to be about, namely the behavior of antivaccinationists? I realize it's an easy target, but, hey, I'm tired. Besides, it amuses me, and, as I've said so many…
oracknows | April 17, 2014Damn it.
After hearing the horrible news that Laura Hymas had died on the same day that I found out that the pro-quackery "health freedom" Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) was supporting a federal "right to try" bill, I thought it would just be a one-off post about Burzynski, his allies, and the human toll exacted by his cancer quackery. No such luck. The reason is that yesterday morning I awoke to e-mails and Tweets from multiple colleagues and bloggers making me aware of an article published in a journal that (once again) I had never heard of, Child’s Nervous System. The article is by—…
oracknows | April 14, 2014In the well over nine years that I've been blogging, there's one tried and true, completely reliable topic to blog about, one that I can almost always find. I'm referring, of course, to the credulous news story about pseudoscience. The pseudoscience can be quackery, creationism, anthropogenic global warming denialist arguments, or whatever; inevitably, there will be some journalist, somewhere, who will fall for it and write a story that basically toes the line that supporters of pseudoscience like to see. Given that I pay the most attention to medicine, I notice this phenomenon the most when…
oracknows | April 13, 2014Never look a blogging gift horse in the mouth, I always say. Well, sort of. It just figures that I could only do two posts that weren't about vaccines before circling back around to the topic of the antivaccine movement. For that, I have Jenny McCarthy to thank. McCarthy, as anyone who pays attention to the antivaccine movement knows, is the most famous antivaccine activist in the United States, if not the world. She's a woman who's used her celebrity to promote the notion that vaccines cause autism, so much so that she willingly lent her name to a notorious antivaccine group (Generation…
oracknows | April 11, 2014When I'm trying to demonstrate the utter implausibility and mystical pseudoscience behind so much of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), which is now more commonly referred to (by its advocates, at least) as "integrative medicine," I like to point to two examples in particular of modalities that are so utterly ridiculous in concept that anyone can understand what I'm talking about. For example, as much as I might deconstruct the nonsense that is acupuncture, discussing how "meridians" don't exist, the "life force" known as qi whose flow acupuncture needles are claimed to redirect…
oracknows | April 9, 2014As I write this, I am winging my way home from the 2014 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR, Twitter hashtag #AACR14) in San Diego. (OK, I'm revising this to fit the format and, of course, the Insolence of this particular blog. Shockingly, I didn't have as much time to blog in San Diego as I had thought I would. Go figure.) Basically, the AACR meeting is one of the largest meetings of basic and translational cancer researchers in the world. I try to go every year, and pretty much have succeeded since around 1998 or 1999. As an "old-timer" who's attended at least a…
oracknows | April 3, 2014I appear to have fallen into one of my ruts again. Or maybe it's not a rut. I just feel as though I've been doing too many posts on the antivaccine movement, to the point where I wonder if I'm starting to fall into a rut. In actuality, it doesn't really matter. If I feel as though I'm getting tired of a topic, then that's enough. It's just that the antivaccine movement, even as bottomless a font of stupidity, misinformation, pseudoscience, and quackery as it is, sometimes goes on a tear. When it does that, I have a hard time restraining myself from trying to blog about all of it, as…
oracknows | April 2, 2014As regular readers know, I was quite happy that Skeptical Inquirer (SI) agreed to publish articles by Bob Blaskiewicz and myself about the highly dubious cancer doctor in Houston known as Stanislaw Burzynski. Indeed, Bob and I have been busily doing our best to promote it, appearing on various podcasts, including Point of Inquiry and, most recently, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, where once again we've called on skeptics to help us put pressure on our elected officials to prevent Dr. Burzynski from continuing to take advantage of desperate cancer patients, many with incurable disease,…
oracknows | April 1, 2014Of all the cranks, quacks, antivaccinationists, and pseudoscientists that I've encountered (and applied a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence to) over the years, there are a few who belong in the top tier—or, if you prefer, the bottom tier. They stick out in my memory for a variety of reasons, either through their sheer crankitude on a variety of subjects (such as Mike Adams), sheer persistence on one subject (such as Jake Crosby or any of the denizens of the antivaccine crank blogs Age of Autism or The Thinking Moms' Revolution), or fame for promoting quackery (Joe Mercola). One of these…
oracknows | March 31, 2014As hard as it is to believe, I've actually "known" pediatrician to the antivaccine stars (such as Jenny McCarthy), "Dr. Jay" Gordon, for nearly nine years now. It began back in 2005 when I first noticed him writing blogs full of antivaccine nonsense at the then-new group blog, The Huffington Post, where I noted antivaccine rhetoric running rampant, complete with amazing examples of what I like to call the "pharma shill" gambit. Since then, he's periodically come to my attention, be it for nonsense equating vaccine manufacturers to tobacco companies, falling headlong for the bogus "toxins"…
oracknows | March 30, 2014As I just mentioned a week ago, there used to be a time when I dreaded Autism Awareness Month, which begins tomorrow. The reason was simple. Several years ago to perhaps as recently as three years ago, I could always count on a flurry of stories about autism towards the end of March and the beginning of April about autism. That in and of itself isn't bad. Sometimes the stories were actually informative and useful. However, in variably there would be a flurry of truly aggravating stories in which the reporter, either through laziness, lack of ideas, or the desire to add some spice and…
oracknows | March 28, 2014Dr. Robert Sears has to be one of the most irresponsible pediatricians on the face of the earth, if not the most irresponsible. Many of you might recall that a little more than a week ago "Dr. Bob" posted a borderline unhinged rant on Facebook aimed at his own patients, who, quite reasonably, were calling him about the measles outbreak going on in southern California right now and asking him about the measles vaccine. It was entitled Measles Epidemic . . . NOT!, and his response boiled down to, in essence, "get the vaccine if you're worried, but there's no real reason to worry." He also…
oracknows | March 27, 2014Note: I was busy doing something last night that left me no time to compose any fresh Insolence, which will become apparent by this weekend. In the meantime, however, I'm betting quite a few of you haven't seen this before, and those who have might want to discuss it further in a different environment.
Quackademic medicine.
I love that term, because it succinctly describes the infiltration of pseudoscientific medicine into medical academia. As I've said many times, I wish I had been the one to coin the phrase, but I wasn't. To the best of my ability to determine, I first picked it up from Dr…
oracknows | March 25, 2014After the last couple of days of depressing posts about the utter failure of the FDA to do its job protecting cancer patients from the likes of Stanislaw burzynski, it's time to move on. Unfortunately, the first thing that caught my eye as I sat down to blog last night not only fried my irony meter as though a radioactive flame had been aimed at it by Godzilla itself but it also stomped that sucker flat as though Godzilla had jumped up and down on it. It came from one of the only places where the bloggers are so utterly without a sense of self-awareness that they could achieve such a feat. No…
oracknows | March 24, 2014After the last couple of days of depressing posts about the utter failure of the FDA to do its job protecting cancer patients from the likes of Stanislaw burzynski, it's time to move on. Given how utterly demoralizing it was to see the FDA, in essence, pass the buck when it comes to protecting cancer patients, I thought back to more amusing times. Oddly enough, some of these times involved Burzynski. Specifically, they involved Burzynski's propagandist Eric Merola, whose spittle-flecked rants never fail to amuse.
For example, a frequent charge made by Burzynski fans like Merola is that we "…
oracknows | March 23, 2014As I sat down to write this bit of Insolence, I had at least two ideas for what I thought would be informative, entertaining, and timely posts. I also didn't want to have to write about Stanislaw Burzynski again after having just done so on Friday, having to note that the FDA caved, granting compassionate use exemptions to use antineoplastons (ANPs) to several patients who had been lobbying for just such exemptions. I already described why what the FDA did was horrifically cynical. When I first saw the message rejoicing of the FDA's decision in message on the Prayers for Elisha Facebook page…
oracknows | March 21, 2014
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."
I know I've used that quote before several times over the 9+ years that I've been blogging. These days, I probably use it most frequently when it comes to the topic of Stanislaw Burzynski. Every time I think that I can give the topic a rest for a while (and, believe me, I do want to give it a rest), something invariably seems to happen to pull me back in. So it was yesterday when i was made aware of a new development so disappointing that I'm still wiping the dirt off my chin from my jaw dropping to the floor. Even more amazing is that…
oracknows | March 20, 2014If there's one thing a budding skeptic quickly learns is that at the core of any good woo almost invariably lurks at least one conspiracy theory. At the risk of flirting a little too close to Godwin territory, this simple fact about pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and other non-evidence-based belief systems was first driven home to me around 15 years ago when I first started becoming interested in Holocaust denial. It didn't take too long for me to discover that at the heart of Holocaust denial are various conspiracy theories. Somehow the Jews, we are told, conspired to exaggerate the number of…