medicine
pharyngula | August 25, 2011Remember that silly blood type nonsense from the Canadian Blood Services? It's gone, replaced with a much simpler page that states that your blood type will be determined when you give blood.
A few people have received email from CBS admitting that they've removed the nonsense.
Dr. Sher has asked me to respond to your recent e-mail regarding our What's Your Type? new donor recruitment program. I understand that you have also sent an e-mail communicating your concerns to www.whatsyourtype@blood.ca and that others from our organization have provided you with specific details in response. I…
pharyngula | August 25, 2011Let's imagine that you, a rational person, are a high muckety-muck in some prestigious scientific institution — like, say, the Royal Society of New Zealand — and you're asked whether some fringe subject — like, say, Traditional Chinese Medicine — should receive the endorsement of your society. How would you determine your answer?
If you're anything like me, you'd go to experts and ask, "Is there good evidence that this really works? Is it a subject we should pursue in greater depth?"
Not the Royal Society of New Zealand, though. No, forget all that business of whether TCM actually works, or…
oracknows | August 25, 2011A couple of days ago, I couldn't resist discussing a recent article in the New York Times about recent discoveries in cancer research. I considered the article to be a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. While the article did a pretty good job of describing recent discoveries about how noncoding RNA, the tumor microenvironment, and even microbes are involved in the pathogenesis of cancer, it had an annoying spin that portrayed some of these discoveries as being much shinier and newer than they actually are. At the time, I noted that quacks would certainly use this article as a jumping-off…
oracknows | August 24, 2011One of the things that distinguishes evidence-based medicine (EBM) and science-based medicine (SBM) is how the latter takes into account prior probability that a therapy is likely to work when considering clinical trials. My favorite example to demonstrate this difference, because it's so stark and obvious, is homeopathy. Homeopathy, as regular readers of this blog no doubt know by now, is a mystical, magical system of medicine based on two principles. The first is the law of similars, commonly phrased as "like cures like"; i.e., the way to treat symptoms is to use a smaller amount of…
oracknows | August 23, 2011About a week ago, there appeared a story in the New York Times about recent discoveries in cancer research written by George Johnson and entitled Cancer's Secrets Come Into Sharper Focus. Overall, it was a better-than-average article for the lay press about recent discoveries in cancer research that go beyond just the cancer cell and just oncogenes. I must admit, however, that certain aspects of it irritated me, not the least of which is that it appeared to buy into one of the most cliched of tropes about medicine and science in spinning the story along the lines of "everything you know about…
oracknows | August 22, 2011Chiropractic has origins in mysticism and vitalistic thinking. Given its popularity and seeming mainstream acceptance, it's easy to forget that these days. Fortunately, Daryl Cunningham reminds us of the history of chiropractic, including its philosophical underpinnings and potential complications:
oracknows | August 21, 2011Sadly, a crank has silenced another skeptic.
Many of you may know EpiRen, which is the Twitter and blog handle (and sometimes commenting handle here) of René Najera. René is an epidemiologist employed by the state public health department of health of an East Coast state and has been a force for reality- and science-based discussions of medicine, in particular vaccines. In fact, he's come out as a strong defender of vaccines against anti-vaccine lies.
Unfortunately, EpiRen is no more, at least online; that is, if he wants to keep his job.
As related to my by Liz Ditz, A Public Servant,…
pharyngula | August 21, 2011David Colquhoun has posted an excellent series of posts on the Steiner Waldorf schools, 19th century crackpottery that persists even now, by hiding their fundamentally pseudoscientific basis under a fog of fancy invented terms. He discusses their goofy philosophy of anthroposophistry, their devious efforts to get state funding, and their unfortunate buy unsurprising history of racism. It's wild and crazy stuff, and it's been sidling under the radar for a while.
What initially drew me to DC's site was his article on quackery in retreat: the University of Westminster has discarded some of…
oracknows | August 18, 2011I don't know if I should thank Peter Lipson or condemn him.
What am I talking about? Yesterday, Peter sent me a brain-meltingly bad study in so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" that shows me just how bad a study can be and be accepted into what I used to consider a reasonably good journal. I say "used to consider," because the fact that this journal accepted a study this ludicrously bad indicates to me that peer review at the journal is so broken that I now wonder about what else I've read at that journal that I should now discount as being so unreliable as to be not worth…
oracknows | August 18, 2011It's always frightening when lawyers delve into the realm of medicine. It's even worse when pre-law students and political science majors do the same.
Such was the thought running through my mind when I came across the most recent issue of the Yale Journal of Medicine & Law. The result is what I would most accurately characterize as--shall we say?--uneven. Even though the authors try to don the mantle of skepticism, for the most part they fail. Perhaps the best example of this failure is this particular article entitled Chiropractic Medicine: "Quackery's" Struggle for Fair Practice.…
oracknows | August 17, 2011Many have been the times that I've pointed out that many forms of "alternative" medicine are in reality based far more on mystical, religious, or "spiritual" beliefs than on any science. Indeed, one amusing event that provided me the opening to launch into one of my characteristic (and fun) Orac-ian outbursts occurred a couple of years ago, when the U.S. Catholic bishops declared that reiki is not compatible with Catholic teachings and shouldn't be offered in Catholic hospitals. Then, earlier this year, the fundamentalists weighed in, when a preacher from the Poconos named Kevin Garman…
oracknows | August 17, 2011It never ceases to amaze me just how ignorant of very basic principles of science anti-vaccine activists often are. I mean, seriously. Every time they try to post something, whether they know it or not, they end up making themselves look so very, very stupid--or at least ignorant. The Dunning-Kruger effect takes over, and people who may actually be very successful--intelligent, even--in other fields of knowledge make newbie mistakes and draw egregiously misinterpreted conclusions from existing data. Worse, they have no clue that they don't know what they're doing. In the arrogance of…
"Integrative medicine" further evolves into "evidence-based complementary medicine." Nothing changes
oracknows | August 16, 2011One of these days I'm going to end up getting myself in trouble.
The reason, as I've only half-joked before, is that, even though I'm not even 50 yet, I'm already feeling like a dinosaur when it comes to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's called more frequently now, "integrative medicine" (IM). These days, we now have the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), the Bravewell Collaborative, and a number of other forces are conspiring to "integrate" quackery with real medicine. As part of that task, it's been necessary to rebrand quackery, a…
oracknows | August 14, 2011NOTE: I was on a lovely vacation for three days in Chicago over the weekend, where I visited old haunts. (Bathroom attendants? At one of my favorite pub hangouts when I lived in Lincoln Park, John Barleycorn? Handing out crappy brown paper towels? Plastering the walls there with endless rows of flat screen TVs turned continuously on sports and news? Really? Oh, the pain.) In any case, what that means is that I didn't write anything new for today (other than this introduction). I did, however, find a lovely post from over two and a half years ago to recycle and update. Remember: If you haven't…
oracknows | August 12, 2011A week ago, I took someone who has normally been a hero of mine, Brian Deer, to task for what I considered to be a seriously cheap shot at scientists based on no hard data, at least no hard data that he bothered to present. To make a long, Orac-ian magnum opus short, Deer advocated increased governmental regulation of science in the U.K. based apparently on anecdotes like that of Andrew Wakefield. Worse, rather than presenting even the limited data that exist regarding the prevalence of scientific fraud, he chose instead to devote too much of his limited word count to characterizing…
oracknows | August 11, 2011The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace, except that it's not just quackademic medicine. Now, it goes way, way beyond that to encompass not just academic medical centers but community hospitals, hospitals of all sizes, large private hospitals, and health care institutions of all shapes and sizes. Frequently, proponents of quackademic medicine try to portray those of us who oppose the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine as being behind the times, as futilely resisting the wave of the future. They portray so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) as the…
oracknows | August 10, 2011Well, well, well, well...
I always wondered about this.
As I pointed out the other day, former NIH director Bernadine Healy died of a recurrent brain tumor. As regular readers know, over the last three or four years, she had become a convert to the vaccine/autism cause, as evidenced by her having been named Age of Autism's "Person of the Year" in 2008. Over the last few years, it puzzled me why she had abandoned science in this area. I also suspected, but couldn't prove, that she had been receiving her lines of nonsense that she had started promoting from the anti-vaccine movement. As a…
oracknows | August 10, 2011Here we go again.
Starting sometime in 2007, back when the idea that mercury in vaccines was the cause of the "autism epidemic" of the late 1990s and into the new century, I started referring to the "mercury/autism" hypothesis as being dead, dead, dead, as in pining for the fjords dead. Then, depending on what kind of mood I was in, I'd start liberally quoting more from Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot Sketch, including pointing out that the mercury/autism hypothesis passed on! This hypothesis is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of…
oracknows | August 9, 2011It came as a shock to me to find out yesterday that former director of the American Red Cross and former director of the NIH Bernadine Healy died. Chalk it up to my simply being ignorant of the fact, but I didn't know, or had forgotten, that she had brain cancer. Interestingly, she had had this glioma and survived 13 years. Compare that to David Servan-Schreiber, who survived his brain tumor for 20 years and attributed much of it not just to medical science, but to all the woo he came to believe in and practice.
For purposes of this blog, the reason her death is even worth noting briefly is…
oracknows | August 8, 2011Over the years that I've been following the anti-vaccine movement, I've become familiar with typical narratives that reporters use when reporting on the vaccine fears stirred up by anti-vaccine activists. One narrative is the "brave maverick doctor" narrative, in which an iconoclastic quack (such as Mark Geier or Andrew Wakefield, for example) is portrayed fighting a lonely battle against the scientific orthodoxy. This particular narrative is extremely popular because it feeds into the story of the "underdog," coupled with a healthy disrespect of the powers that be, particularly the…