medicine
oracknows | January 15, 2014Here we go again. In the wake of study after study that fails to find activity of various "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) beyond that of placebo, the campaign to a "rebrand" CAM as "working" through the "power of placebo" continues apace, in the wake of the successful campaign to "rebrand" various needle-based medical modalities as "acupuncture." Personally, I've argued that in reality this new focus on placebo effects as the "mechanism" through which CAM "works" is in reality more a manifestation of the common fantasy that wishing makes it so. Meanwhile I've argued that this…
oracknows | January 13, 2014One aspect of science-based medicine (SBM) that I perhaps don't spend enough time and effort on is the intersection of law and medicine for areas in medicine other than the infiltration of pseudomedicine like "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) into academia and the never-ending quest of quacks like naturopaths to gain state licensure in states where such pseudomedicine is not licensed and to expand their scope of practice in states where it is. Instead, Instead, I'll look at something going on in my state, namely an effort to expand the scope of practice of a group of medical…
oracknows | January 12, 2014There was a time when I used to blog about Jenny McCarthy a lot. The reason, of course, is that a few years ago, beginning in around 2007, she seized the title of face of the antivaccine movement in America through her "advocacy" for her son Evan, whom she described as having been made autistic by the MMR vaccine. She even described his diagnosis thusly to Oprah Winfrey in 2007:
Right before his MMR shot, I said to the doctor, I have a very bad feeling about this shot. This is the autism shot, isn’t it? And he said, “No, that is ridiculous. It is a mother’s desperate attempt to blame…
oracknows | January 10, 2014I realize that everyone, is looking forward to my deconstruction of Mike Adams' quacktacular attempt at being a real scientist (well, some of you, anyway). I must confess, though. I was a bit disappointed. And, being like Dug the Dog (a comparison I so frequently make), my attention was easily distracted. I'm sure I'll get back to Mikey eventually, but he really did show such a lack of imagination in his "big announcement" that I'm actually having a hard time motivating myself to apply any "Insolence" to it. It just doesn't seem worthy of the effort it would take, at least not right now.
In…
oracknows | January 8, 2014Well, that didn't take long. I knew it had been too quiet on the Burzynski front. In retrospect, that was almost certainly because of the holidays, but the holidays are over, and real life is here again.
Yes, the year 2014 is only a little more than a week old, and here comes Stanislaw Burzynski again, hurt but not defeated in the wake of all the negative publicity he received late last year, thanks to Liz Szabo's USA TODAY expose. Actually, in a way it might have been a good thing that I was delayed in addressing this a day by my little bit of weakness Tuesday night that led mere exhaustion…
oracknows | January 8, 2014Long day in the OR yesterday. By the time I got home, believe it or not, I was too beat to deliver one of my characteristic rants full of Insolence and science that my readers all know and love (well, mostly love). Consequently, today's a perfect day for a quickie. (No, not that kind of quickie; get your minds out of the gutter!) I'm referring to an observation that a reader sent in the other day about the upcoming yearly autism "biomed" quackfest known as Autism One. It's a little ditty I'd like to call Bleach Enema Karaoke:
It’s Kalcker’s Kerrioke Lounge hosted by the CD Community at…
oracknows | January 6, 2014Because of my involvement in this organization, I am hijacking my own blog for one day for my own nefarious purposes. To that end, I am republishing an announcement that originally appeared yesterday at a blog that a significant fraction of you are familiar with, but nowhere near all of you. And I want all of you to know about this, because I hope that some of you will join our cause.
I'm also going to add a few words of my own, because I can't help it. (As Hans Solo once said, "Hey, it's me.") The reason this new organization, the Society for Science-Based Medicine, is so needed is because,…
oracknows | January 5, 2014Believe it or not, even your ever-lovin' box of colored blinking lights can malfunction, and it happened to me over the weekend. Actually, sometime around New Years, I caught some sort of crud, and have been battling it since. There's nothing like hacking up a lung and not being able to sleep well for days to put one in a perfect mood to be particularly Insolent. And so it would have been, until my part of the country managed to be buried in snow all day and night Sunday, necessitating multiple rounds of going out to use the snow blower in spite of my condition and having to get up super…
oracknows | January 1, 2014This is not what I wanted to write about for my first post of 2014, but unfortunately it's necessary—so necessary, in fact, that I felt the obligation to crosspost it to my not-so-super-secret other blog in order to get this information out to as wide a readership as possible.
I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Facebook. On the one hand, I like easily how it lets me stay in contact with family and friends across the country, people whom I would rarely see more than once or twice a year, if even that. On the other hand, I have the same privacy concerns that many other…
oracknows | December 31, 2013As I write this, 2013 is drawing to a close, with only a little more than 12 hours to go before the crowds now gathering at Times Square and elsewhere ring in 2014. For some of you, 2014 has already arrived or will arrive many hours before it does for me. I'm not normally one to do much navel gazing, but 2013 has been a mixed year. As far as this blog goes, for instance, readership is up, with over 3.5 million page views for the year, although that's still a little below the blog's height before the whole "Pepsigate" thing. (It's really hard to believe that was almost three and a half years…
oracknows | December 30, 2013NOTE: Because I've been (kind of) relaxing over this holiday period, this is not an entirely new post. It is, however, a significantly expanded and reworked version of a post from nearly four years ago. So if you haven't been reading four years, it's new to you, and if you have you might or might not remember it.(Who remembers a blog post four years later? I'm not that good—usually.)
Those who know me and/or follow me on various social media know that I'm a big Doctor Who fan. I have been since the 1980s. So the last two big events of the year, the 50th anniversary special in November and the…
oracknows | December 26, 2013And now for something completely different...
Unfortunately, it's all too easy to find new woo-filled claims or dangerous, evidence-lacking trends to write about. Heck, I did it just last week. Examining certain other health-related issues from a science-based perspective is more difficult, but I feel obligated to do it from time to time, not just for a change of pace but to stimulate the synapses and educate myself—and, I hope, you as well—about areas outside of my usual expertise. As much as I enjoy bringing a science-based perspective to topics like cancer quackery, vaccines, and all…
oracknows | December 20, 2013One of the frequent topics on this blog is, unsurprisingly, cancer quackery. Be it the Gerson therapy and its propensity for encouraging patients to take hundreds of supplements and to shoot copious amounts of coffee where it really doesn't belong (where the sun don't shine), the Gonzalez protocol, homeopathy, naturopathy, or various other nonsensical and dangerous cancer therapies with no scientific basis, I take them on because, as a cancer surgeon, I can't stand seeing cancer patients abused this way. If they're curable, I hate seeing them seduced into throwing away their chance for cure,…
oracknows | December 19, 2013I remember during medical school that more than one of my faculty used to have a regularly repeated crack that the only thing that taking vitamin supplements could do for you was to produce expensive pee. My first year in medical school was nearly thirty years ago now; so it's been a long time. During the nearly three decades since I first entered medical school, I have yet to see any evidence to persuade me otherwise. If you eat a well-rounded diet, you don't need vitamin supplementation. Of course, none of that stops the supplement manufacturers from trying to convince us that taking…
oracknows | December 17, 2013Whoa.
How did I miss this? Maybe it was all the other stuff going on last week, such as the Sarah Hershberger case, multiple updates on Stanislaw Burzynski, and Katie Couric's sort-of apology about her awful segment on HPV vaccines. So much stuff was going on that I forgot that December 11 was my nine year blogiversary.
Yes, nine years ago on that day, the wonder (or at least obnoxiousness) that was Orac was born (or at least stolen from an obscure 30 year old British SF show). Since I was so exhausted last night that I fell asleep on the couch with my wife and my dog, I figure I might as…
oracknows | December 16, 2013These days, Dr. Oz seems to stand for everything I oppose in medicine: Fear mongering, quackery, making claims that he can't back up with science, and, of course, filthy lucre. On second thought, I'm not against filthy lucre per se. In fact, I wouldn't mind having some of it myself. However, I also want to keep my integrity, and if getting a piece of that filthy lucre involves compromising myself, my scientific credibility, and my overall credibility as much as Dr. Mehmet Oz has done over the last several years, I'll have to settle for my comfortable upper middle class existence. It's not so…
oracknows | December 13, 2013Thanks, Daily Kos.
Well, not really. You'll see why in a minute, but first here's the background. There's a general impression out there that the political right is associated with the antiscience that includes anthropogenic global warming denialism, denial of evolution, and denial of aspects of reproductive biology that don't jibe with their religious beliefs, and that consensus while the political left's brand of antiscience includes antivaccine beliefs and fear mongering about genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Of course, as I've discussed many times before, it's more complicated than…
oracknows | December 11, 2013The central mystery of Stanislaw Burzynski is how he keeps managing, no matter what is thrown at him by state and federal medical authorities, to keep on treating patients with deadly cancers. He's like the Energizer Bunny; he just keeps going and going and going and going. Or maybe he's like the game Whac-A-Mole™, where, as soon as one strategy seems on the verge of shutting him down he pops up elsewhere with another angle.
Burzynski, as regular readers know, is the Houston doctor (I refuse to call him a cancer doctor, because he has no formal training in oncology or even board certification…
oracknows | December 10, 2013Vaccines against the human papilloma virus (HPV), such as Gardasil and Cervarix, seem to have a strange power over people who are otherwise reasonable about science and vaccines. For some reason, HPV vaccines seem to have an uncanny ability to turn such people into raging antivaccinationists almost as loony as the merry band of antivaccine loons over at Age of Autism. At the very least, they seem to make seemingly reasonable people susceptible to blandishments and tropes for which they'd normally otherwise never fall. Truly, Gardasil and Cervarix seem to be vaccines that make reasonable…
sa smith | December 10, 2013Some of you might remember this story from last year:
Evolution: Crime Fighting Machine
A hospital technician, David Kwiatkowski, has been accused of stealing pain medication (100 times as potent at morphine) and sterile needles from surgical patients. Not only did patients not get the pain medication they needed, Kwiatkowski also exposed them to Hepatitis C, which he knew he was infected with for several years.
The story was a good 'teachable moment' for how scientists can use evolutionary biology in a courtroom. Alas, none of that fun and interesting science was needed, as Kwiatkowski…