medicine
oracknows | March 30, 2011Yesterday, I learned of how animal rights terrorists are targeting college students as the "soft underbelly of the vivisection movement." As an example of their new strategy, these thugs gloated over the "recantation" by a Florida Atlantic University student named Alena Rodriguez, who, because of her e-mail to a Negotiation Is Over editor named Ghazal Tajalli rejecting her request to become involved in an animal rights event, was targeted for a campaign of intimidation, smears, and harassment. As a result, Rodriguez was sufficiently terrified that she basically gave the thugs what they wanted…
oracknows | March 29, 2011I've made no secret of my disdain for self-proclaimed "animal rights" activists, the ones who are more than willing to terrorize scientists doing research to understand disease better and thereby develop better treatments and even cures. None of this means that I am some sort of "animal abuser" (to steal the animal rights jargon) or that I'm cruel and advocate "torturing" animals. There is a difference between animal rights and animal welfare; animal rights activists in essence equate a mouse with a rat with a dog with a pig with a human being. In any case, I've reported how animal rights…
oracknows | March 29, 2011Well, it's over.
The grant is in, but it was painful, and I was exhausted, both in brain and body, last night. That's why there's no Insolence right now. Last night, I chilled, cracked open a cold one, watched some utterly mindless TV, and crashed early in order to be ready for a day in the OR. So that means it's time for my favorite blog space-killing gambit when things get too busy for me to lay down my daily dose of Insolence: Open thread!
Have fun. Well-rested, I'm off to the OR. I'll be back later.
oracknows | March 28, 2011Grant time again! Since today--yes, today!--is the deadline for a rather big grant I'm writing (not quite R01 level, but a respectable three year project if I can get it), I was up until the wee hours of the morning trying to put this sucker to bed. Being the ever-benevolent blogger, though, far be it from me to deny you some Insolence. It'll just have to be recycled Insolence. Not just recycled Insolence, either. Old recycled Insolence, four years old, to be precise! Unbelievable! In fact, it's so old that the links don't even work anymore; so you'll have to take my word for it that I quoted…
oracknows | March 25, 2011One of the major tactics of the anti-vaccine movement has been a disingenuous demand for more "informed consent." Of course, their idea of "informed consent" is anything but informed. Indeed, I have referred to it as "misinformed consent," because what the anti-vaccine movement does is a pathetic parody of the "informed" part of informed consent. The reason is because the anti-vaccine movement exaggerates the risks of vaccination beyond what science supports, and it does it intentionally. Autism, asthma, autoimmune disease, neurodevelopmental disorders, all of these have been blamed on…
oracknows | March 24, 2011Remember Dr. Jay Gordon? I haven't written about him in a while because, well, as much as he's descended into anti-vaccine apologia over the last few years, he really has nothing new to say. However, apparently he's been Tweeting a lot lately, and he hasn't exactly been doing himself proud. Earlier today, one of my readers sent me an example of a Tweet by Dr. Jay that sinks to a new low of argumentation:
So...should I call this particular logical fallacy argumentum ad television or argumentum ad bradi bunchium? Seriously, Dr. Jay, this sort of argument is pathetic, even by your standards.…
oracknows | March 23, 2011As a cancer surgeon, one aspect of the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers that bothers me more than most others is how willingly academia has been to "integrate" quackery with science-based oncology to form the bastard stepchild known as "integrative oncology" that has metastasized to numerous cancer centers that should know better. Metastatic deposits of quackademia have infiltrated the University of Texas-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, UCSF, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and many others. It's quackademic medicine victorious out there; or at least so it seems.
Yet,…
oracknows | March 23, 2011I don't like quackery.
I know, I know. Big surprise, right? After all, I've only spent the last six years laying down a nearly daily dose of Insolence, Respectful and not-so-Respectful, on the anti-vaccine movement, alternative medicine practitioners, quacks, and pseudoscientists of many different stripes. Seeing my fellow human beings fall for unproven or even dangerous remedies leads me to want to try to convince them to pull back and stick with science-based medical therapies. When quackery causes harm, I become even more motivated. Yet there is an area of quackery that I rarely write…
oracknows | March 22, 2011Calling all Texas skeptics! Well, at least Texas skeptics who can find their way to Galveston on March 29. The reason? Well, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston is hosting the Nicholson Round-table Integrative Lecture Series:
"Complementary and integrative medicine in cancer care -- What does the evidence show?" will be presented by Dr. Moshe A. Frenkel, founder of the integrative oncology clinic at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
He will be joined by panelists Dr. Avi B. Markowitz, chief of the division of hematology/oncology and head of the office of oncology clinical trials at…
oracknows | March 22, 2011For years now, one of the major themes of this blog, between laying the cluestick on anti-vaccine loons and examining quackery and pseudoscience in all its forms, has been to examine the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia. The reason, as you might expect, is because, as an academic surgeon myself who runs his own laboratory, seeing pseudoscience and religious quackery such as reiki, therapeutic touch, naturopathy, and even homeopathy and anthroposophic medicine, has in the past usually disturbed me far more than seeing this sort of nonsense in private practice settings…
oracknows | March 21, 2011Here's something for you all to check out. Trine Tsouderos, the journalist from The Chicago Tribune who's distinguished herself as being one of the few reporters who "gets it" when it comes to quackery and the anti-vaccine movement (just put her name in the search box of this blog for some examples) will be hosting a web chat about vaccines featuring none other than Dr. Paul Offit, one of the gutsiest (if not the gutsiest) defender of vaccine science out there. The chat will occur here at noon CDT today. Questions can be submitted in advance to Tsouderos at ttsouderos@tribune.com.
Head on…
oracknows | March 21, 2011I graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in the late 1980s. Back then, U. of M. was really hardcore about science back then, so much so that it was viewed as seriously old-school. No new (at the time) organ system approach for us! During the first two years, ever four weeks, like clockwork, we'd have what was called a concurrent examination, which basically meant that we were tested (with multiple choice tests, of course!) on every subject on the same morning. At the time I was there, the medical curriculum for the first two years had been fairly constant for quite some time…
oracknows | March 20, 2011Well, well, well, well.
Last week, I wrote one of my usual patented bits of insolence directed at "America's doctor," Dr. Mehmet Oz. What prompted my irritation was a recent episode in which Dr. Oz featured psychic scammer John Edward, the self-proclaimed "psychic" who claims to be able to speak with the dead. In actuality, Edward is nothing more than a mediocre cold reader, but he's parlayed his skills into a lucrative career as host of his own TV show (Crossing Over With John Edward, which ran for several years back in the 1990s and early 2000s), author, and touring psychic medium. His…
oracknows | March 18, 2011
Many are the times when I've pointed out that many "complementary and alternative medicine" CAM or "integrative medicine" (IM) modalities are very much more based on religion or mystical ideas akin to religion than on anything resembling science. I realize that my saying this is nothing new, but every so often I see something that reminds me of this concept to the point that, self-important logorrheic blogger that I am, I can't resist commenting, particularly when I'm amused by the story. This particular story is amusing, to me at least.
You see, it's about what happens when one religion…
oracknows | March 17, 2011You know, I really know the feeling described in this song:
I really do. How about you?
oracknows | March 17, 2011People believe a lot of wacky things. Some of these things are merely amusingly wacky, while others are dangerously wacky. Among the most dangerously wacky of things that a large number of people believe in is the idea that germ theory is invalid. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that among the most dangerously wacky of nonsense is germ theory denialism; i.e., the denial that germs are the cause of disease. Few theories in medicine or science are supported as strongly by such a huge amount of evidence from multiple disciplines that converge on the idea that microorganisms cause disease,…
oracknows | March 15, 2011There are times when I'm wrong again and again.
No, I'm certainly not referring to my writings about vaccines which, as much as anti-vaccine loons like to claim they're wrong, are not. Nor am I referring to my writings about "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM). While it's possible that I've made mistakes here and there, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about being utterly and demonstrably wrong, something that, although it might happen in my real life with distressing frequency, is pretty rare on the blog.
Then came Dr. Oz.
You remember Dr.…
oracknows | March 15, 2011Yesterday, I did a post about ethics in human experimentation. The reason I mention that is because in the comments, a commenter named Paul pointed out an editorial of the sort of variety that we frequently see whenever there is a revelation of misdeeds in human research and a response to that article that is far too mild for the level of idiocy in the editorial. The editorial was written by Justin Goodman of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Appearing in the Sacramento Bee, Goodman's article makes a dubious and typical false analogy for an animal rights activist,…
oracknows | March 13, 2011Progress in science-based medicine depends upon human experimentation. Scientists can do the most fantastic translational research in the world, starting with elegant hypotheses, tested through in vitro and biochemical experiments, after which they are tested in animals. They can understand disease mechanisms to the individual amino acid level in a protein or nucleotide in a DNA molecule. However, without human testing, they will never know if the end result of all that elegant science will actually do what it is intended to do and to make real human patients better. They will never know if…
oracknows | March 11, 2011In many ways, the anti-vaccine movement is highly mutable. However, this mutability is firmly based around keeping one thing utterly constant, and that one thing is vaccines. No matter what the evidence, no matter what the science, no matter how much observational, scientific, and epidemiological evidence is arrayed against them, to the relentlessly self-confident members of the anti-vaccine movement, it's always about the vaccines. Always. Vaccines are always the root many human health problems, be they asthma, autoimmune diseases, autism, and chronic diseases of all types. Everything else…