medicine
oracknows | November 15, 2010Every so often on this blog I get in the mood to take on a post on the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism. Over the three years of its existence, I've seen some truly bizarre posts, ranging from one blogger blithely discussing how he took his daughter to Costa Rica for stem cell quackery to treat her autism to rants against journalists who have the temerity to point out that the scientific evidence out there does not support the idea that vaccines cause autism to attacks on perceived enemies of the anti-vaccine movement in which these enemies have their heads crudely Photoshopped into…
oracknows | November 14, 2010Yesterday my wife and I were doing a bit of shopping for various household supplies at one of our favorite stores, our local Target. Having already been disturbed by the sheer volume of Christmas decorations and items on sale two weeks before Thanksgiving, I was even more disturbed to see this:
Yep, it's everywhere. Oscillococcinum. A homeopathic treatment, quackery right there on the shelves. The only thing good I could think of to say about this is that it's absolutely true that this remedy is, as advertised on the package, non-drowsy, with no interactions with other drugs, and without…
oracknows | November 12, 2010Last night, seeking to expand the name of Orac rather than his waistline, I did a skeptical meetup with a local skeptics' group to discuss the topic of quackademic medicine. A fine time was had by all (at least as far as I can tell). What that means, unfortunately, is that I got back too late last night to have time to prepare a helping of new insolence that you all crave. (And you know you do crave it so.) Fortunately, the archives are here and chock full of excellent woo to republish from time to time, perfect for this situation, and I'm taking advantage of them now. The installation from…
oracknows | November 12, 2010Last night, seeking to expand the name of Orac rather than his waistline, I did a skeptical meetup with a local skeptics' group to discuss the topic of quackademic medicine. A fine time was had by all (at least as far as I can tell). What that means, unfortunately, is that I got back too late last night to have time to prepare a helping of new insolence that you all crave. (And you know you do crave it so.) Fortunately, the archives are here and chock full of excellent woo to republish from time to time, perfect for this situation, and I'm taking advantage of them now. The installation from…
oracknows | November 11, 2010Check out the latest Andrew Wakefield tweet. Yep, that's him Tweeting out a link to the infamously intellectually dishonest post by Dr. Raymond Obomsawin entitled Proof That Vaccines Didn't Save Us, just as Australian anti-vaccine loon Meryl Dorey posted the same link on her blog about a month ago and Obomsawin himself is continuing to promote the same intellectually dishonest, graphs of cherry-picked data. To me, that puts Wakefield in the same low league as Dorey herself.
Once again, Andrew Wakefield, meet Orac and his deconstruction of Obomsawin's tour de force of anti-vaccine misdirection…
oracknows | November 11, 2010I don't know how I missed this article. I really don't. It's over a week old, and it's exactly the sort of irritating cancer quackery that normally draws me irresistibly to it to slather it in a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence. After all, being a cancer surgeon and all, I really, really hate cancer quackery, even more so than I detest other forms of quackery. I hate it even more when it comes from Mike Adams, creator of NaturalNews.com, that one-stop shop for all things quackery, anti-vaccine, and conspiracy. Basically, it's an example of Mike Adams discovering something about…
oracknows | November 10, 2010I didn't feel much like blogging last night, but I felt as though I had to, even if it's brief.
Yesterday was one of those crappy days where there were a lot of problems that didn't relent, so much so that I was completely occupied and didn't check my e-mail until the evening. It was at that point that I wish I hadn't. What I found in my in box was a whole slew of e-mails informing me that a friend had died.
Mark was a friend I had never met.
One of the odd things about the Internet is that it is indeed quite possible to become virtual friends with someone, forging a friendship that lasts for…
oracknows | November 9, 2010It occurs to me that I ought to thank Mark Hyman, "pioneer of functional medicine," and creator of "Ultrawellness," particularly since he started blogging for that wretched hive of scum and quackery (WHSQ), The Huffington Post. He may not post all that often, but when he does I can be assured that the woo will be flowing in torrents from HuffPo to my computer screen, thus providing me with yet another dose of blogging material. Not surprisingly, given Hyman's history, his latest bit on HuffPo is no different. Entitled Cancer Research: New Science on How to Prevent and Treat Cancer From TEDMED…
oracknows | November 8, 2010I advocate science-based medicine (SBM) on this blog. However, from time to time, consider it necessary to point out that SBM is not the same thing as turning medicine into a science. Rather, I argue that what we do as clinicians should be based in science. Contrary to what some might claim, this is not a distinction without a difference. If we were practicing pure science, we would theoretically be able to create algorithms and flowcharts telling us how to care for patients with any given condition, and we would never deviate from them. It is true that we do have algorithms and flowcharts…
oracknows | November 6, 2010As a final post on Vaccine Awareness Week, after having asked what it means to be anti-vaccine, before moving onI thought I'd post this video, a link to which Andrew Wakefield himself tweeted:
Who says Andrew Wakefield is not anti-vaccine? If he does, he's lying. But, then, Andrew Wakefield does lie a lot.
oracknows | November 5, 2010As Vaccine Awareness Week, originally proclaimed by Joe Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher to spread pseudoscience about vaccines far and wide and then coopted by me and several other bloggers to counter that pseudoscience, draws to a close, I was wondering what to write about. After all, from my perspective, on the anti-vaccine side Vaccine Awareness Week had been a major fizzle. Joe Mercola had posted a series of nonsensical articles about vaccines, as expected, but Barbara Loe Fisher appeared to have sat this one out, having posted nothing. Well, not quite. More like almost nothing. I noticed…
oracknows | November 4, 2010I may have taken a break yesterday, but that doesn't mean I've abandoned my mission to make this Vaccine Awareness Week (or, more properly, the Anti-vaccine Movement Awareness Week, dedicated to countering the lies of the anti-vaccine movement). Even though it was good to take a day off, the anti-vaccine movement rarely takes a day off, and yesterday was no exception. Indeed, one of the most belligerent anti-vaccinationists of all, the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest anti-vaccine bull of all, decided to show up for the first time in a long time yesterday on his organization's…
oracknows | November 3, 2010There was no time to blog last night due to a lovely night out with my beautiful wife. Fortunately, this week being Vaccine Awareness Week, I have an interview with a "friend" of mine on...vaccines! Yes, Skeptically Speaking somehow thought this dufus was worth interviewing. Fortunately, he makes a lot of sense when it comes to vaccines.
Check it out.
Fear not, though, there are plenty of targets topics for tomorrow and beyond...
oracknows | November 2, 2010One of the great things about having declared Vaccine Awareness Week is that it gives me a convenient excuse to revisit topics and blog posts that I had meant to address but that somehow didn't make the cut the first time around. This is the sort of thing that happens fairly frequently in blogging, where there is far too much woo and idiocy for one blogger to have even a hope of ever addressing it all.
And that's just the anti-vaccine movement.
In any case, if there's one thing about the anti-vaccine movement that I've noticed, it's that its members have a very warped view of both science and…
oracknows | November 1, 2010"Anti-vaccine."
I regularly throw that word around -- and, most of the time, with good reason. Many skeptics and defenders of SBM also throw that word around, again with good reason most of the time. There really is a shocking amount of anti-vaccine sentiment out there. But what does "anti-vaccine" really mean? What is "anti-vaccine"? Who is "anti-vaccine"? Why? What makes them "anti-vaccine"?
Believe it or not, for all the vociferousness with which I routinely go after anti-vaccine loons, I'm actually a relative newcomer to the task of taking on the anti-vaccine movement. Ten years ago, I…
oracknows | October 31, 2010As brief as it will be, this is my first post for my self-declared Vaccine Awareness Week, proposed to counter Barbara Loe Fisher's National Vaccine Information Center's and Joe Mercola's proposal that November 1-6 be designated "Vaccine Awareness Week" for the purpose of promoting all sorts of pseudoscience, quackery, and misinformation about "vaccine injury" and how dangerous vaccines supposedly are. As you may recall, I decided to try to coopt the concept for the purpose of countering the pseudoscience promoted by the anti-vaccine movement and urging medical, science, and skeptical…
oracknows | October 29, 2010If there's one thing that confounds advocates of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), it's the placebo effect. That's because, whenever most such remedies are studied using rigorous clinical trial design using properly constituted placebo controls, they almost always end up showing effects no greater than placebo effects. That's the main reason why they frequently suggest that, you know, all those rigorous, carefully constructed randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials aren't really the best way to investigate their woo after all. To them, it's much better to do "…
oracknows | October 28, 2010I was out late last night due to the call of duty. By the time I got home, it was too late, and I was too beat to provide you with the heapin' helpin' of Insolence, Respectful or not-so-Respectful, that I usually do. Nor did I have time to draft a substantive reply to Dr. Zilberberg, who is in the comments and apparently very unhappy that I criticized her for her tendency towards dualism and her repeating various things that sound similar to some of the favorite gambits of the anti-vaccine movement. I had basically had the temerity to suggest to Dr. Zilberberg that, if she doesn't want to be…
oracknows | October 27, 2010On Monday I took a blogger by the name of Dr. Marya Zilberberg to task for firing a series of profoundly anti-scientific broadsides against science-based medicine (SBM). Although I did not attack Dr. Zilberberg personally, I was quite harsh in my characterization of her attacks, because, well, they were quite bad, full of straw men, special pleading, and the claim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, all topped off with a particularly egregious mischaracterization of what SBM is. Steve Novella also piled on, which was appropriate because Dr. Zilberberg's attacks were mainly…
oracknows | October 26, 2010Forgive me if I'm feeling a little schadenfreude right now.
My current blog location has been criticized in the past for a variety of things, including, most recently, Pepsigate. One of the things that we've been criticized for is our on-again off-again use of Google Adsense, where the content of the page dictates which ads pop up. For skeptical blogs, this sometimes has some rather embarrassing consequences. For instance, when I write about vaccines, sometimes the ad server would serve up ads for chelation therapy or anti-vaccine quack nostrums. Ditto when I wrote about homeopathy, which…