medicine
oracknows | February 20, 2013Here's a little thought experiment for proponents of "alternative medicine." Imagine, if you will, a small pharmaceutical company. Founded in the 1970s, it has starts out with only one product, a drug that its founder thought to be a very promising anticancer agent. So enamored of this particular drug was the founder of the company that he left a job with an academic medical center, founded his own clinic, and then his own research institute and company to manufacture the new drug. After first having painstakingly isolated the substances that make up his drug, he later started to synthesize…
oracknows | February 17, 2013About a week and a half ago, I noted that the FDA had apparently paid every skeptic's favorite cancer doctor who is not an oncologist, Stanislaw Burzynski, a visit, while taking notice of a particularly credulous piece of puff journalism that portrayed Dr. Burzynski as a "brave maverick doctor" fighting The Man, who (of course) is trying to keep him down because he has The Natural Cure For Cancer "They" Don't Want You Sheeple To Know About.
Burzynski, as you recall, is the Houston doctor who claims to have much better results curing incurable cancers than conventional evidence-based…
oracknows | February 15, 2013You might have noticed that I've been...preoccupied. I posted a "rerun" on Thursday, and yesterday I didn't even post at all. That doesn't mean that I don't check in from time to time to see what you all are doing in my absence. That's how I saw this comment from Dangerous Bacon (cool 'nym, BTW—I've always wanted to mention that):
Hey, enough of this “I’m working on a grant application” excuse.
Orac needs to get back up to his mom’s attic and crank out some new posts.
Fear not. The grant has been submitted. On the other hand, I'm giving a talk next week in Missouri, and I have to put the…
oracknows | February 14, 2013Over the last couple of days, I've been discussing How "They" See "Us," which is basically that "they" see "us" as pure evil. Well, maybe not always sheer evil, but certainly not good, and even more certainly as having ulterior motives, the most common of which is filthy pharma lucre. So it seemed appropriate, as a grant deadline fast approaches and constrains my time, to revisit a topic that comes up here from time to time. Basically, every so often, my day job intrudes on my blogging hobby, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to…
oracknows | February 10, 2013Epigenetics. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I realize I overuse that little joke, but I can't help but think that virtually every time I see advocates of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's known more commonly now, "integrative medicine" discussing epigenetics. All you have to do to view mass quantities of misinterpretation of the science of epigenetics is to type the word into the "search" box of a website like Mercola.com or NaturalNews.com, and you'll be treated to large numbers of articles touting the latest…
oracknows | February 6, 2013On the one hand, I'm seriously tempted to get out the popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show that is the internecine conflict going on in the antivaccine movement right now. On the other hand, as bizarre as it sounds, I actually do feel a bit sorry for the main combatant, Jake Crosby. He's the guy whom I likened to an antivaccine Frankenstein's monster turning on his creators last week. The reason was that Jake had become very, very unhappy with the antivaccine leaders who created him, or at least who created the blogging phenomenon that is Jake Crosby, Internet Detective and Disher of Dirt.…
oracknows | February 4, 2013Gary Null loves me! He really loves me!
Well, maybe not Gary Null, but Sayer Ji. You remember Sayer Ji, don't you? He's the guy who runs GreenMedInfo.com who showed up on my skeptical radar when he claimed that vaccines are "transhumanism" that subverts evolution. (Seriously, you can't make stuff like this up.) On another occasion, he attacked Bill Gates for funding projects to monitor the antivaccine movement, and went wild attacking such activities as though they were a bad thing. Most recently, Ji launched a spectacularly inept attack on evidence-based medicine in which he tried to…
oracknows | January 31, 2013I'm sure this is a case where someone thought it was a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, it's not. It's an astoundingly bad idea:
The Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation is bringing McCarthy to town March 2 to headline its annual Bust a Move fundraiser as a guest fitness instructor. But the actress, author and former Playboy playmate is perhaps best known these days for her unconventional views on autism, specifically her anti-vaccination writings. Her son Evan Joseph was diagnosed with autism in 2005, but McCarthy says now her son is in “recovery” and is doing much better.
McCarthy has…
oracknows | January 29, 2013On Monday of this week, Michael Specter published an article in The New Yorker entitled THE OPERATOR: Is the most trusted doctor in America doing more harm than good? In the article, Specter expended considerable verbiage that, as I explained yesterday, was beautiful in how it let Oz reveal through his own words that (1) he is no longer a scientist and (2) how he views science-based medicine as apparently religion and just another way of knowing. Indeed, so off the wall were Oz's utterances in this article that Jeff Bercovici boiled it down, summarizing it as Dr. Oz's Five Wackiest Medical…
oracknows | January 28, 2013In the beginning, medicine was religion. Indeed, if you look at the history of medicine, you'll see that the very first physicians were virtually always religious figures in addition to their roles as healers. Indeed, in ancient Egypt, for example, the professions of priest and healer were one, and most medicine involved incantations, invocations of magic, and, of course, prayers to the gods, who were believed to be both the cause and the cure of human disease. Amulets were particularly popular, and consisted of three types: homeopoetic, phylactic and theophoric. Homeopoetic amulets, for…
oracknows | January 17, 2013Even though I've been at this skeptical blogging thing, particularly about "alternative" medicine, so long (eight years now) that I think I've seen it all, that nothing the quacks do can shock me any more. It's a foolish hubris, I admit, but, I hope, an understandable one after over eight years of blogging multiple times a week about science, skepticism, and quackery that can and has made my head spin. It is true that encountering something that gets my attention and truly knocks me on my posterior is getting rarer and rarer. It's not so rare that it doesn't still happen every now and then:…
oracknows | January 14, 2013I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine Force, which is, of course, by definition the Dark Side.
Whenever I sense such a disturbance, there are a number of possible reactions that it provokes in me. One such reaction is alarm, as when antivaccine activists say something that is just clever enough to sound plausible enough that it might cause trouble. It never is, of course, but it often takes a close reading and some research to figure out what the game is and deconstruct the nonsense. Sometimes, my reaction is amusement, as when an antivaccine activist says something that is so hilariously…
oracknows | January 13, 2013Eric Merola doesn't much like me.
Actually, no one who is an apologist for Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, a.k.a. "Stan the Man," who over 30 years ago unleashed antineoplastons on unsuspecting cancer patients, much likes me. It's not surprising. As you might recall, antineoplastons are chemicals that Burzynski found in the urine of cancer patients and that (or so he claims). Claiming that antineoplastons were endogenous inhibitors of tumor growth made by the body and of which cancer patients are deficient, thus allowing cancer to grow, he embarked on a campaign to treat cancer patients with them.…
oracknows | January 9, 2013About a year and a half ago, I applied a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence to a a clueless article about the the "triumph" of New Age medicine. The article channeled the worst fallacies of apologists for alternative medicine. Basically, its whole idea appeared to be that, even if most of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" is quackery (which it most certainly is), it doesn't matter because allegedly it's making patients better because its practitioners take the time to talk to them in a way that most doctors do not. In brief, the article was…
oracknows | January 8, 2013Remember Dr. Sin Hang Lee?
If you don't remember Lee, maybe you remember a while back, when the antivaccine group SaneVax touted findings that it claimed were devastating to Gardasil. Specifically, they claimed that there was vaccine-derived human papilloma virus DNA in Gardasi. Ring any bells yet? And it turns out that the guy who made this apparently horrific "discovery" was—you guessed it!—Dr. Sin Hang Lee. Back in 2011, Lee, apparently either funded by or working with SaneVax, "discovered" that there was DNA in his Gardasil. As I explained at the time, there was a lot less to this claim…
oracknows | January 8, 2013If there's one thing about "alternative" medicine, "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), or "integrative medicine" that's always puzzled me, it's just how gullible some practitioners must think their clients are. In some cases, they might know their customers every bit as well as a car salesman knows his clients or an author knows his readers, but in actuality most people who fall for alt-med are no more gullible than average. However, some words seem to impress more than ever, as promoters of alt-med scramble to appropriate impressive-sounding science terms into their woo. I've…
oracknows | January 6, 2013Today's post will be relatively brief (for an Orac post, that is). The reason is that it's some very sad news that depresses me greatly. It's also because I don't want to distract too much from the announcement I'd like to highlight. About a month and a half ago, around the same time that Stanislaw Burzynski managed to get off on a technicality, with the Texas Medical Board agreeing to dismiss its case against Burzynski because it apparently couldn't go after him for treatment decisions made by doctors he hired, I met an unfortunate girl named Amelia Saunders. Amelia had been diagnosed with a…
oracknows | December 30, 2012Homeopathy amuses me. Homeopaths amuse me as well, which is why I'm resurrecting this post. It was originally published elsewhere a few years ago and somehow never crossposted here. So if it seems a bit dated, fear not; Orac hasn't fired up his Tarial cells and managed to go back in time. Now, I realize that lately, due to my work schedule, I've had a tendency to crosspost too much between this blog and my other less "insolent" blogging locale. I know that and plan to try to do much less of it in 2013.
But it's not 2013, and I'm still sort of on vacation.
Besides, I have a very good reason to…
oracknows | December 12, 2012Note: Orac is away somewhere warm recharging his Tarial cells for further science and skepticism. In the meantime, he is rerunning some of his favorite posts. Given that the blog seems to have been infiltrated with Burzynski trolls again and Eric Merola threatens to make a sequel to the execrable movie he made about Burzynski a couple of years ago, now seems a perfect time to rerun a post of Orac's from about a year ago. In fact, now might be a perfect time to rerun these posts. Indeed, maybe I'll even rerun the whole trio, as Orac has been thinking he needs to do a major update and…
dr. dolittle | December 10, 2012
Carol Meteyer, USGS National Wildlife Health Center
With an estimated 6.7 million bat deaths related to white nose syndrome, understanding this devastating disease is more important than ever. Wildlife Pathologist Carol Meteyer, from the USGS National Wildlife Health Center, has been studying the carcasses of bats that survived white nose syndrome infections, only to succumb to their own immune systems. The overactive immune response is called immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS). While hibernating, the immune system of these bats are down-regulated making them more…