medicine
oracknows | October 11, 2010Words fail me. How anyone can be so callous beggars imagination. Yeah, sure, Jennifer Petkov ultimately apologized, but only after news of her vileness was spread far and wide around the world. Worse, it was one of those "not-pologies" where Petkov said she was sorry "if anyone was hurt" not that she was sorry for having behaved despicably and thereby having caused that hurt, all topped off with an utterly lame and completely unbelievable lie that she "never really meant any ill wishes towards" Kathleen Edward or her family. And, yes, wearing the glasses was a nice obviously cynical touch…
oracknows | October 10, 2010Over the weekend, I saw a rather fascinating post by Sullivan entitled A Sense of Civil Discourse. The reason I found it so fascinating is because what was quoted in it utterly destroyed my irony meter yet again, leaving it nothing but a molten, gooey mess still bubbling and hissing in my office. Apparently last week, Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted, authors of the distillation of all the craziness that is the blog Age of Autism into book form under the same title, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, did a radio interview on the Leonard Lopate Show. During the…
oracknows | October 8, 2010Around about this time last year, the nation, nay, the world, was in the throes of a frenzy about the H1N1 influenza pandemic. It was also fertile ground for skeptical blogging for two reasons. First, it was a major health-related story. Second, the mass vaccination campaigns for H1N1 that governments thew together hurriedly was a magnet for quacks, cranks, and loons of the anti-vaccine variety. Truly, the craziness came fast and furious, with each new day bringing a new atrocity against science and reason. Indeed, even one of my favorite magazines, The Atlantic, wasn't immune, as…
oracknows | October 7, 2010Last week blew by me in a blur. Because I was in full grant writing frenzy to get an R01 in the can by Friday, pretty much anything that wasn't totally urgent got shoved aside, at least after Wednesday. Of course, it was last Wednesday that yet another mammography study was being touted as a "landmark" study. I had just enough time to look it over briefly and decide that I really should blog about it, particularly given that it came hot on the heels of a Norwegian study less than a week before that found the benefits of mammography to be less than previously believed and even more…
oracknows | October 6, 2010As I mentioned earlier this morning, I went to get my annual flu vaccine. It's the least I can do to protect myself and to protect the immunosuppressed patients around me in a major cancer center. I was looking forward to cheekily asking the nurse administering the vaccine to make sure mine had thimerosal, but when I got to the part of the clinic where the flu vaccines were being administered I was in for a nasty surprise.
The first indication came when I had to fill out a form similar to last year's form asking me if I had ever had a reaction to egg products or the seasonal influenza vaccine…
oracknows | October 6, 2010It's about time.
My cancer center is finally offering the flu vaccine for its employees, and I'm off to go and get it. I'll be sure to ask for extra thimerosal. Even though Jock Doubleday's challenge seems to have disappeared, I'll still do it in his honor.
This year, I'm particularly proud of my cancer center in that its leadership has made a stand by partnering with other health care institutions in the city and requiring the flu vaccine for employees who directly interact with patients. That means doctors, nurses, support staff, receptionists, pretty much everyone other than the lab rats…
oracknows | October 5, 2010One of the favorite fallacious arguments favored by pseudoscientists and denialists of science is the ever infamous "science was wrong before" gambit, wherein it is argued that, because science is not perfect or because scientists are not perfect, then science is not to be trusted. We've seen it many times before. Indeed, we saw it just yesterday, when promoters of quackery and anti-vaccine cranks leapt all over the revelation that American scientists had intentionally infected Guatemalan prisoners with syphilis without their consent as part of an experiment in the 1940s. They didn't attack…
oracknows | October 4, 2010If there's one thing that burns me about so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) clinical trials, it's how unethical many of them are. This is particularly true for trials that test modalities that, on the basic science grounds alone, can be dismissed as so highly implausible and with such a low prior probability of success that it is unethical to subject patients to risk with close to zero potential for benefit. Perhaps the most egregious example of such a clinical trial is the Gonzalez protocol in pancreatic cancer, a cornucopia of woo and quackery including up to 150…
oracknows | October 3, 2010As I recover from the joy of deadlines, I decided to take the weekend off from blogging (new material, at least). In the meantime, here's some good Sunday reading for you, the Cancer Research Blog Carnival.
The Insolence shall return tomorrow. And there are, unfortunately, many deserving targets, not all of them woo.
oracknows | October 1, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times, thanks to R01 deadlines. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in September 2007 that, shockingly, as far as I can tell I've never "rerun" before. Remember, if you've been reading less than three years it's probably new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than three years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged.
As I usually do on Thursday nights, I was perusing my legendary Folder…
oracknows | September 30, 2010It just occurred to me that it's been a long, long time since I've done this, but how about an open thread to while away the time until the NIH R01 grant application is submitted, and that gloriously irritating and outrageously beautiful not-so-Respectful Insolence that you all crave can come roaring back with a vengeance? Come on, you know you want it. If we're lucky, maybe Jake Crosby or even Dr. Jay will come out and play.
Grant writing has that effect on me.
In the meantime, I think a video from a most excellent 1980s band sums up the situation when it comes to grant funding these days…
oracknows | September 30, 2010...take a gander at this post by Steve Novella about Gary Kompothecras and Charlie Crist and how they are endangering children's health in Florida by promoting the father-son team of antivaccine pseudoscientists Mark and David Geier, the very same issue I wrote about yesterday.
Fear not. The end is in sight. The logorrheic insolence you know and love (or hate) will soon return. In the meantime, I really need some coffee.
oracknows | September 29, 2010It's grant crunch time, which almost always means that a lot of stuff happens that I don't have time to write about and that the week after I submit it (i.e., next week) usually nothing interesting happens to write about and I'm left posting LOL Cats or something like that. Be that as it may, sometimes something happens that goads me to the point where I have to comment, although reality keeps me from my usual logorrhea. Who knows, maybe that's a good thing.
In any case, yesterday Brandon Thorp (who also works for the JREF) teamed up with Penn Bullock to write a disturbing report on just how…
oracknows | September 27, 2010I hate The Huffington Post. I really do.
Why, you ask, do I hate HuffPo so? I hate HuffPo so because of its history from the very beginning of its existence of promoting the vilest forms of anti-vaccine quackery and pseudoscience. It's because, over the last couple of years, not content with being the one-stop-shop for all things antivax on the Internet, right up there with Whale.to, Mercola.com, and NaturalNews.com, HuffPo branched out very early into quantum quackery, courtesy of Deepak Chopra. Just search for "Huffington Post" and "Deepak Chopra" on this blog and you'll discover how many…
drorzel | September 27, 2010It's that time of year again-- the Swedes will be handing out money to famous scientists, with the announcements of who's getting what starting one week from today. Thus, the traditional Uncertain Principles Nobel Prize Picking Contest:
Leave a comment on this post predicting the winner(s) of one of this year's Nobel Prizes. Anyone who correctly picks both the field and the laureate will win a guest-post spot on this blog.
The usual terms and conditions apply. If you don't have anything you'd like to guest-post about, you can exchange your guest post for a signed copy of How to Teach Physics…
oracknows | September 27, 2010Unfortunately, it's grant application crunch time again over the weekend. That means something's got to give, and what happened to be the thing to give was this blog. Fortunately, all is not lost, as a "good friend" of mine has commented on a recent New England Journal of Medicine study from Thursday about mammography. It may not be as "insolent" as the commentary that Orac lays down, but it's pretty darned good.
I'm fully expecting that the "alternative" medicine crowd will soon jump all over this study as "proof" that mammography is useless. It's nothing of the sort, and, more importantly,…
oracknows | September 26, 2010If there's one scary thing about working, it's the common kitchen area. On each floor of the research tower where my lab is located, there is a small area at the end of the hall with a sink, coffee maker, refrigerator, and some cabinets. These areas are all too rarely cleaned out. Last week, for some reason, an intrepid lab rat decided that the refrigerator on my lab's floor needed a cleaning. She found this:
So far, so what? Right? There's nothing unusual there. Someone forgot their Slimfast. Then she turned over the can (click image for larger version):
Expiration date: July 2004. I…
oracknows | September 24, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. Besides getting into full R01 grant-writing swing, I went out to dinner last night with a visiting professor and didn't get home until too late for me to grind out one of those 2,000-4,000 word screeds you've come to know and a love. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in November 2006 that, shockingly, as far as I can tell I've never "rerun" before. Remember, if you've been reading less than four…
oracknows | September 23, 2010Naturopathy is a strange beast in the "alternative medicine" world. From what I've been able to tell, it's a wastebasket specialty with no overarching philosophical underpinnings, as traditional Chinese medicine underpins acupuncture or sympathetic magic underpins homeopathy. Basically, if it's woo, naturopaths will use it. Acupuncture, TCM, homeopathy, herbalism, nutritional woo, detox, it doesn't matter. To naturopaths, it's all good, as long as it isn't "conventional medicine." Wait. Not quite. After all naturopaths have been fighting for (and in some cases getting) prescribing authority…
oracknows | September 22, 2010Sometimes I can't figure anti-vaccine loons out. No, I'm not talking about the pure pseudoscience they lay down on a daily basis. I can sort of get how some of them might cling against all scientific evidence to the idea that somehow vaccines "damaged" their child, along with the blandishments of the army of quacks known as DAN! doctors promising them that, if you just use this diet, this new supplement, this new nostrum, this hyperbaric oxygen, you can have a normal child again. What I can't get is how individuals who, however misguided they are about science, even to the point of laying…