medicine
oracknows | December 27, 2010Christmas is over. Heck even Boxing Day is over. Still, Orac is doing something very unusual for him in that he's taking a bit of a staycation at home. Consider it a sanity break. Even though I'll be working on grants and a variety of other projects at home and even though I haven't signed out my pager to one of my partners, it is still a very good thing indeed not to see the inside of my office for ten days. As for blogging, understandably, given that readership has fallen off markedly the week between Christmas and New Years each and every year since I started blogging way back in 2004, I…
oracknows | December 24, 2010This being Christmas Eve and all, I hadn't planned on blogging. However, sometimes things happen that demand a change in plans. Consequently, although I don't plan on doing one of my usual logorrheic treatments of this issue, I do plan on mentioning something, because sometimes schadenfreude is a most excellent Christmas gift.
Remember Dr. Rolando Arafiles, Jr., a physician at Winkler County Memorial Hospital in Kermit, TX? He's the doctor trying to foist a whole boatload of woo on his patients about whom two brave nurses, Vicki Galle, RN, and Anne Mitchell, RN, complained to the Texas…
oracknows | December 23, 2010In discussing "alternative" medicine it's impossible not to discuss, at least briefly, placebo effects. Indeed, one of the most common complaints I (and others) voice about clinical trials of alternative medicine is lack of adequate placebo controls. Just type "acupuncture" in the search box in the upper left hand corner of the blog, and you'll pull up a number of discussions of acupuncture clinical trials that I've done over the years. If you check some of these posts, you'll find that in nearly every case I discuss whether the placebo or sham control is adequate, noting that, the better the…
oracknows | December 21, 2010When it comes to "alternative" medical practices from Asia (or from anywhere else, for that matter), I've ceased to be surprised by anything I hear. After all, if somehow, some way, people can justify just about any strange health that can be imagined. If you don't believe me, I have two words for you: Coffee enemas. If you still don't believe me, I have two more words for you: black salve (i.e., burning skin lesions off). Still don't believe me? I have three more words for you:
Vaginal steam baths.
Yep. I learned about it in a news story in the L.A. Times yesterday entitled Vaginal steam…
oracknows | December 20, 2010During the six years of its existence, one frequent complaint I've had on this blog, it's been about how the press covers various health issues. In particular, it's depressing to see how often dubious and even outright false health claims, such as the claim that vaccines cause autism, that cell phones or powerlines cause cancer, or that various questionable or even quack remedies work for various diseases are reported credulously. Often this takes the form of a journalistic convention that is more appropriate for politics and other issues but not so appropriate for scientific and medical…
tfk | December 19, 2010Michael Egnor is still upset. Earlier, he penned an inaccurate, misleading, and ⦠well ⦠egnorant defense of his views on abortion, responding to my critique of his claim that personhood is easy to define.
His earlier reply repeatedly and incorrectly attempted to associate the content of this blog with my employer. As the sidebar on every page makes clear, the opinions expressed here are not those of NCSE. People who try to tag content here as reflecting NCSE policy or views instantly lose a lot of credit in my accounting of their literacy.
Egnor continues that trend in his latest…
oracknows | December 17, 2010NOTE: Orac was actually out rather late last night. It turns out that the more administrative responsibility he somehow seems to find the more he has to go out to dinner as a part of various cancer center-related functions. As a result, he is recycling a bit of recent material from elsewhere that he in his extreme arrogance considers just too good not to post up on this blog too. In any case, it's always interesting to see how a different audience reacts to his stuff, and he did make some alterations to this post.
'Tis the season, it would seem, for questioning science. Not that there's…
oracknows | December 16, 2010There are multiple recurring messages on this blog that have evolved over the years, but, if there's one of them that has been consistent since the very beginning, it's been about the inherent unreliability of single person testimonials. I wrote about this very topic virtually at the inception of this blog in a post that I still quote from time to time, and I wrote about it just last week when I discussed the case of a woman named Kim Tinkham, a woman who gives every indication of having died of breast cancer, a cancer that had a good chance of being cured had she only pursued effective…
oracknows | December 15, 2010It's times like these that I'm glad I'm a clinician-scientist:
Or maybe not.
The reason is that the same conversation in a clinician-scientist's review would be asking why he's only produced X number of RVUs last year and suggesting pointedly that he needs to double his RVU output. Oh, and, by the way, he needs to get grants, publish clinical trials, and teach residents and medical students, too, all while taking more call. And don't forget that it's the very rare clinician-scientist who can bring in more money to a department in indirect costs from federal grants than he or she could bring…
oracknows | December 14, 2010If you need some woo, and you need it fast, who ya gonna call? HuffPo!
Yes, as I've pointed out since its very inception, if there's one thing The Huffington Post is good at doing, it's butchering medical science and serving up regular heapin' helpings of the purest woo. Be it the anti-vaccine pseudoscience that has dominated its pages from the very beginning (including posts by our old friend Dr. Jay Gordon), the quantum woo favored by Deepak Chopra, or the rank quackery that's been showing up on HuffPo's pages more and more frequently over the last two years or so, there's no "respectable"…
oracknows | December 13, 2010Egads!
You remember my fun little post about a Sokal-type hoax perpetrated by John C. McLachlan, when he completely fooled the "scientific review" committee of a complementary and alternative medicine conference with a hilarious Sokal-inspired hoax in which he created, in essence, butt reflexology. I thought it was an amusing and fairly original bit of made-up woo.
It turns out I was wrong. A reader just pointed me to Jacqueline Stalline's Rumpology. It turns out that she's an astrologer, and that she thinks she can tell a lot about you by reading your rump:
Jacqueline Stallone has revived…
oracknows | December 13, 2010I can't think of a better way to start year seven on the ol' blog.
Remember how I speculated that perhaps Age of Autism or NaturalNews.com would provide me with the first topic of my next year of blogging? It turns out that I was wrong. It didn't come from either of those sources, although I will reassure the antivaccine loons at AoA and Mike Adams at NaturalNews.com not to fear. I'll get to them soon enough. The Huffington Post, too, given that apparently Mark Hyman's back with his woo. In any case, AoA and Mike Adams may at times be utterly hilarious, but they can't compare to what readers…
oracknows | December 11, 2010Has it really been six years?
Six years ago today, on a dim and dreary Saturday in December, almost on a whim I sat down, went to Blogspot, and started up the first version of Respectful Insolence with an introductory post with the cliched title, Please allow me to introduce myself. Here it is, six years later. On this cold December Saturday, I still find it difficult to his blog is considered one of the "top" medical blogs by one measure, and some actually--shockingly--consider me somewhat of a "famous" skeptic. I know, I know, I still can't wrap my head around the concept myself. At least,…
oracknows | December 9, 2010I was originally going to switch it up and blog about something other than cancer. In fact, there is a particularly juicy bit of anti-vaccine nonsense that I wanted to write about because it shows the utter mendacity of a certain anti-vaccine website that, believe it or not, is not Age of Autism. I know, I know, it's hard to believe, but there actually is an anti-vaccine group that is giving Generation Rescue a run for its money when it comes to sheer crazy. It'll keep, though, until next week. In the meantime, I have even worse crazy to deal with. In the meantime, I have even more despicable…
cagapakis | December 8, 2010Evolution connects all living things on earth, from the arsenic tolerant bacteria in the news this week to the human scientists and bloggers chatting about it. Eyes are intricately complex structures made up of many many cells, but even single-celled microbes can sense and respond to light through the function of proteins that share evolutionary similarity with the light receptors of the human retina. Incredibly, genetic engineering is showing us just how similar these proteins can be--transferring the genes that code for these processes leads to functional proteins, even when huge…
oracknows | December 8, 2010Two women died of breast cancer yesterday. One was named Kim Tinkham. One was named Elizabeth Edwards.
In some ways, these women were similar. True, one was older than the other, but both of them died far sooner than they should have, one at age 53, the other at age 61. Both engaged in activism about breast cancer. Both were ambitious, driven women. Both died in the presence of their friends and family. Both died within hours of each other. Both demonstrated the implacable killer that breast cancer can be.
There the similarities end. One of these women (Kim Tinkham), for example, died…
tfk | December 7, 2010I know Christopher Maloney is a quack because this is how quacks act. PZ Myers wrote a blog post way back when pointing out that Maloney is a quack, a naturopathic "doctor" in Maine. He urged parents to skip vaccinating their kids, and to have them drink berry juice and take garlic pills instead. That isn't how the real world works, alas. The flu vaccine really does stop the flu, while black elderberry has nothing like the clinical evidence required for this sort of recommendation.
Rather than taking that criticism to heart, Maloney had his wife, a lawyer, send nastygrams to the hosts of…
oracknows | December 7, 2010It's been pointed out to me that it was announced three hours ago on the Caring for Kim Facebook page that Kim Tinkham has passed away. A woman named Dana Ponder announced:
Kim just passed. I was there by her side and it was peaceful. Thank you for all the kind words. I tried to read all the post to her, hoping she heard them all. She was (is) so loved.
From all indications I've been able to find, Kim died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer. And so a quack claims another victim.
And so Oprah Winfrey contributed.
And so a family mourns the loss of a mother, a spouse, a…
oracknows | December 7, 2010I'm still perturbed about yesterday.
I'm still perturbed that a cancer quack was able to convince a woman who had everything to live for that he could cure her of her breast cancer without surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. I'm still perturbed at this particular cancer quack's attitude, where he tried to claim that he didn't know the woman who is dying, Kim Tinkham, and imply that her cancer recurred because didn't follow his regimen carefully enough, that she had stopped living the quack's "alkaline diet." I thought of my mother-in-law, who died in 2009 of metastatic breast cancer, and…
oracknows | December 6, 2010In the wake of the revelation that Kim Tinkham is dying of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer to bones, lungs, and liver after having rejected conventional therapy for her disease in favor of Robert O. Young's acid-base woo, Young's response is now (possibly) known. In the comments after part 6 of Young's interview with Kim Tinkham (discussed by me here), a commenter by the 'nym of inhisgrace7 reports:
I wanted to find out for myself the truth so I wrote to Dr. Young and here is his response. Kim has always made her own decisions about cancer. Before I met her she had…