medicine
oracknows | January 13, 2011It is with some trepidation and more than a little regret that I begin writing this piece. The reason for my hesitation is that, by doing so, no matter what I say I'll be inserting myself into what appears to be a disagreement among people all of whom I admire very much. I don't really want to do it, but I feel obligated, because the issues brought up in the disagreement are important, and reasonable people can disagree--sometimes strongly--about them. I also believe that someone whom I admire greatly has made a regrettable mistake.
Over the last week or so, I've been blogging a lot about the…
oracknows | January 12, 2011Clearly, once the allegations of Andrew Wakefield's fraud, conflicts of interest, and business plans to profit off of his demonization of the MMR came to light, it was only a matter of time before this arrived:
NOTE: Apparently the creator of this parody has removed it. I've sent an e-mail asking to reconsider.
oracknows | January 11, 2011One of the favorite attacks favored by advocates of pseudoscience, particularly advocates of the sort of pseudoscience favored by proponents of "alternative" medicine, particularly the more militant ones who really, really detest conventional, science-based medicine, is to poison the well with a pre-emptive ad hominem attack that implies that defenders of science-based medicine are somehow interested in nothing but money. The first favored attack is to point out that the pharmaceutical industry is interested in nothing but money. That's partially true (they are, after all, for profit…
oracknows | January 10, 2011The fallout from Brian Deer's further revelations of the scientific fraud that is anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield continues apace.
Remember last week, when I wrote about the first article of the two-part series enumerating the various ways that Andrew Wakefield committed scientific fraud in putting together the case series that became the basis of his now infamous 1998 Lancet paper (now retracted)? Remember how, in describing the crazed manner in which Wakefield apologists immediately started circling the wagons to defend their hero?, I wondered what had happened to the celebrity…
oracknows | January 10, 2011Remember how early this morning I posted about Mike Adam's despicable and ghoulish attempt to seize on the tragedy of the shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) by Jared Lee Loughner as a way of blaming the pharmaceutical industry and government for his violent rampage and intentionally conflating the decrying of violent rhetoric that might have helped to inspire a probably mentally ill individual to commit an act of mass murder? At the time, I observed that, whenever I think that Mike Adams has gone as low as he can go, he always manages to prove me wrong and go even lower…
oracknows | January 9, 2011I've written a lot about Mike Adams, the man who founded NaturalNews.com and has been one of the most prominent promoters of quackery on the Internet. Indeed, Mike Adams appears to be battling it out with Joe Mercola for the title of owning the biggest quackery website on the Internet. There's one area, however, where Mike Adams clearly reigns supreme, and that's latching on, ghoul-like, to major tragedies in order to promote his pro-quackery agenda. For example, when former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow died of metastatic colon cancer a couple of years ago, Mike Adams was right there…
oracknows | January 7, 2011Just so you know, I claim the title of Mopey. Either that, or Sleepy, even though I'm not a trauma surgeon or OB/GYN.
oracknows | January 6, 2011If my post today is a bit shorter on the usual Respectfully and not-so-Respectfully Insolent verbiage that you've come to know and love (or hate), I hope you'll forgive me. It's hard not to sit back, rest a bit, and enjoy the spectacle of Andrew Wakefield being pilloried in the press in the wake of the BMJ's article documenting his scientific misconduct in gory detail. He's gotten away far too long with trying to split the difference when credulous journalists "tell both sides of the story" so that to those not knowledgeable about his scientific fraud and incompetence it seems as though there…
oracknows | January 5, 2011Pity poor Andrew Wakefield.
2010 was a terrible year for him, and 2011 is starting out almost as bad. In February 2010, the General Medical Council in the U.K. recommended that Wakefield be stripped of his license to practice medicine in the U.K. because of scientific misconduct related to his infamous 1998 case series published in The Lancet, even going so far as to refer to him as irresponsible and dishonest, and in May 2010 he was. This case series, thanks to Wakefield's scientific incompetence and fraud, coupled with his flair for self-promotion and enabled by the sensationalistic…
oracknows | January 5, 2011Hmmmm. Somehow I didn't think this was what one normally thinks of when one hears the term "coming out":
You know. Sometimes tolerance is not called for.
oracknows | January 4, 2011Back in December, I took issue with a highly irritating article by someone who normally should know better, Jonah Lehrer, entitled The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With the Scientific Method?, so much so that I wrote one of my typical long-winded deconstructions of the article. One thing that irritated me was contained in the very title itself, namely the insinuation that the "decline effect," which is the tendency of effects observed in early scientific experiments demonstrating a phenomenon to "decline" or become less robust as more and more experiments are performed, is…
oracknows | January 4, 2011As a blogger, every so often I come across a link, file it away, and then when I look through my link collection looking for topics to blog about I rediscover the link but totally forget where I got it from. This is just one of these times. However, since it's less than three weeks until the event being promoted, I thought it might be entertaining to write about it. Unfortunately, it requires revisiting a topic that I've written about a few times before, albeit not recently. I'm referring to the American Medical Student Association and its embrace of woo, i which it has even gone so far as…
oracknows | January 3, 2011About a week ago, I laid a bit of the ol' Orac-style ultra-snarkiness on CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta for having done an embarrassingly credulous interview with two of Oprah's minions who participated in the atrocity that was Oprah's episode about faith healer John of God. One of the most disappointing things about Dr. Gupta's interview is that he seemed fairly clueless about John of God's "forceps in the nose" trick. Well, while I happened to be perusing incoming links last night, I came across the very good Skepdic article on John of God. Honored that Orac would be…
oracknows | January 3, 2011As hard as it is to believe after the pile of poo that was 2010, the year 2011 is starting out rather promisingly, at least from the point of view of science-based medicine. Its beginning has been greeted with the release of two--count 'em, two!--books taking a skeptical, science-based look at vaccines and, in particular, the anti-vaccine movement.
First off the mark (for me, at least) is a new book by a man whom the anti-vaccine movement views as the Dark Lord of Vaccination, Sauron himself sitting up in Barad-dûr (apparently the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of…
oracknows | January 2, 2011You know, I think I agree with ZDoggMD. The anti-vaccine movement has become so successful that perhaps it needs its own movie franchise to show its heroic resistance against vaccines:
It's round about time we in the medical community recognized the heroic efforts of those who would warn us against the horrible dangers of vaccinations. I mean, these are unsung superheroes, bravely facing down mountains of evidence and decades of public health outcomes data in favor of a more trustworthy source: the Internets. They are tireless advocates, working to ensure that a child's behind is left behind…
oracknows | December 31, 2010As hard as it is to believe, today is the last day of 2010. An old year has flown by once again, and, almost before I realized it, a new year will arrive where I live in mere hours. It's been a truly weird year, even more so than the average level of weirdness. That's why I can't think of a better way to close it out than to post something that is just as weird as 2010 has been. Ever since I saw this on Bioephemera nearly three weeks ago, I've been looking for an excuse to post this video. Given that I'm going to spend the last day of 2010 working on a grant, leaving little time for finishing…
oracknows | December 30, 2010Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
I realize I say these things again and again and again, but they bear repeating because together they are a message that needs to be spread in as clear and unambiguous a form as possible. First, whenever you hear someone say, "I'm not anti-vaccine," there's always a "but" after it, and that "but" almost always demonstrates that the person is anti-vaccine after all. Second, for antivaccine loons, it's always about the vaccines. Always. It's not primarily about autism advocacy; it's primarily about the vaccines and blaming them for autism. Autism…
oracknows | December 28, 2010It's the week between Christmas and New Years, and, oddly enough, I'm feeling exceptionally lazy. For one thing, it's a slow "news" time; nothing much is happening to blog about, at least nothing that's motivated me to rouse myself from my declining food-induced coma to lay down some not-so-Respectful Insolence today. For another thing, I'm supposed to be on vacation! Well, sort of. I will be working on grants for part of today, and I've already answered a whole bunch of work-related e-mails, fool that I am. In any case, this post dates way, way back to November 2005. True, I did repost it…
oracknows | December 28, 2010It's the week between Christmas and New Years, and, oddly enough, I'm feeling exceptionally lazy. For one thing, it's a slow "news" time; nothing much is happening to blog about, at least nothing that's motivated me to rouse myself from my declining food-induced coma to lay down some not-so-Respectful Insolence today. For another thing, I'm supposed to be on vacation! Well, sort of. I will be working on grants for part of today, and I've already answered a whole bunch of work-related e-mails, fool that I am. In any case, this post dates way, way back to November 2005. True, I did repost it…
oracknows | December 27, 2010File this under another "better late (as in after Christmas) than never."
Remember Elyse Anders? Remember how she successfully rallied skeptical activists to try to put the kibosh on an effort by the anti-vaccine group SafeMinds to infiltrate theaters with their commercials desguised as public service announcements over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend? Remember how she actually had considerable success, particularly with AMC Theaters? Well, it turns out that our job might not yet be done:
Last night, after I had a glass of wine and a delicious butter pecan cupcake, I got a disturbing text…