pseudoscience

There’s an old saying that basically asks the question, “With friends like these, who needs enemies? or, as Voltaire (or Marshal Villars, depending on the account) said, “May God defend me from my friends: I can defend myself from my enemies.” The point, of course, is that friends or allies can sometimes be as infuriating as enemies, if not more so. Such is the case with Alice Dreger, author of Galileo’s Middle Finger, a book dedicated to describing how activists can undermine science in favor of ideology. I’ve written about her twice that I can recall, although both in the context of a…
I’ve frequently referred to “integrative medicine” as the “integration” of quackery with conventional, science-based medicine for the very good reason that that’s what it really is. However, advocates of medicine not based in science are nothing if not masters of marketing, which is how, over the course of three decades or so, “alternative medicine” morphed into “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), which ultimately morphed into its most recent incarnation, “integrative medicine.” The term “integrative medicine” is fantastic from a marketing perspective because it implies (and is…
I’ve been writing about this topic so long—ever since the very beginning of this blog—that it seems as though I’ve always been doing it even though this blog has been in existence only 11 years and I didn’t really come to appreciate the problem until after I had started this blog. No, I’m not referring to the antivaccine movement, which is another longstanding concern of mine. This time, I’m referring to what I like to refer to as “quackademic medicine,” defined as the infiltration of unscientific and pseudoscientific medicine into medical academia. Indeed, there was a time when I tried to…
One of the most frequent complaints leveled at pro-science advocates who defend vaccines against antivaccine misinformation and pseudoscience is that we’re way too fast to label them as “antivaccine,” that we use the term as a convenient label to demonize their views. We’re not really antivaccine, they tell us. We’re vaccine safety advocates. Really. Now, I have no doubt that this is how most of these antivaccinationists masquerading as vaccine safety activists see themselves, to the point where sometimes I find it refreshing when I encounter an antivaccine activist who proudly labels herself…
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of John Oliver. When my aging body allows me to stay awake late enough on Sunday nights and there’s a new episode on, I’ll almost always be watching. Since starting his own show Last Week Tonight With John Oliver on HBO, Oliver’s become quite the expert at using humor to explain and bring attention to injustices that are widely ignored and to skewer politicians and blowhards. This Sunday, he turned his attention on science reporting: I certainly would have written about this for yesterday, except that at 11:30 PM on Sunday night there’s only one place for…
[Note: Since this was written, Donald Trump won Indiana and Ted Cruz has suspended his campaign. This is why I changed the title of this post on Tuesday night. Meet your presumptive nominee, Republicans.] I haven’t written anything about Donald Trump and vaccines in a while. When last I did write about him, I enumerated his long, sordid history of making ridiculously pseudoscientific antivaccine statements linking vaccines to autism dating back at least to 2007. That was when I first discovered him and referred to him as the latest celebrity antivaccinationist drinking the Kool Aid of vaccine…
There is a disturbance in the antivaccine Force. I can sense it. Actually, it doesn’t take any special talent to detect this. You don't have to be some sort of pro-science Jedi. The evidence is everywhere. The most prominent examples of posts in the antivaccine crankosphere that tipped me off are on—of course!—the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, which references another blog’s post with blaring capitalized headlines, BREAKING: CDC WHISTLEBLOWER "DR. THOMPSON HAS BEEN HANDLED" SAYS DR. HOOKER AT MANHATTAN VAXXED Q&A. Elsewhere, He Who Shall Not Be Named (and to whom I shall no…
Celebrities who support pseudoscience and quackery are worse than regular, run-of-the-mill believers because they have a much larger soapbox than any of us do. I have a pretty healthy blog traffic for a medical blog, but even I don’t reach more than maybe 10,000 people a day. Even at my not-so-super-secret other blog, we only reach four or five times that in a day on average. Compared to the millions that someone like, for example, Oprah Winfrey used to reach on a daily basis or that someone like Dr. Mehmet Oz reaches on a daily basis today, the reach of the entire science blogosphere is…
Of all the forms of quackery that have been “integrated” into medicine of late, arguably one of the most popular is acupuncture. It’s offered in fertility clinics. It’s offered in hospitals and medical clinics all over the place. The vast majority of academic medical centers that have embraced quackademic medicine offer acupuncture. (Quackademic medicine, for those not familiar with the term we reserve for the study of alternative medicine in academic medical centers that really should recognize it as quackery.) Hell, quite a few that haven’t embraced quackademic medicine offer acupuncture.…
When I wrote about a systematic review of the medical literature regarding measles and pertussis outbreaks that demonstrated quite convincingly that, for these two diseases at least, the nonmedical exemptions and vaccine refusal endanger everyone, not just the unvaccinated, I was rather disappointed. I was rather disappointed because, although the article had been in press a couple fo days at the time, no antivaccine loon had taken it on with the bad arguments that I mentioned. If there's one thing that seems to escape antivaccinationists, it's that the unvaccinated are at much more risk in…
One of the cool things about being a longtime blogger in the skeptical world with a reasonably high profile is that I've met, either virtually or in person at various skeptic conferences, a wide variety of people from all over the world. One place in particular that has a vibrant skeptic movement is, of course, Australia, and I've been happy to meet skeptics such as Rachael Dunlop, Jo Benhamu, Richard Saunders, Eren Segev, and several others. I know that, whenever I finally manage to make that trip to Australia that I've been meaning to make for years, there will be people I know to meet up…
Yesterday was kind of busy and a long day in the operating room rather drained me. So I only had time for a quick followup to yesterday's post on how Matt Carey obtained the entire document dump that the "CDC whistleblower" William W. Thompson gave to Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), who then gave it to Alex Jones wannabe Ben Swann, who promised a story on it over a month ago but thus far hasn't delivered. Brian Deer, appropriately enough, pointed out some quotes that I hadn't really elaborated on sufficiently, as did Matt Carey in a followup post. Back in August, Rep. Posey read an excerpt from a…
Christmas and New Years are almost here. As a result, as is always the case this time of year, we're being flooded with "year end" lists. These lists are a fun distraction that I actually rather look forward to as an amusing (and sometimes annoying) year end tradition. In particular, I'm a sucker for "best of the year" and "worst of the year" lists, particularly the latter. Unfortunately, I've usually been too lazy to construct such lists of my own, but maybe this year will be different and next week I'll do so. Or not. Be that as it may, it gave me a bit of a chuckle to see that Mike Adams…
Whenever I point out that a very common thread of "thought"—if you can call it "thought"—in alternative medicine is nothing more than germ theory denialism, the usual reaction is incredulity. Newbies who haven't encountered quacks before invariably do a double take when I inform them that germ theory denialism is a thing, particularly among antivaccine activists. (After all, vaccines don't make sense if microorganisms don't cause disease.) Yet, time and time again I find examples of quacks who deny that disease is a consequence of infection. In fact, some go so far as to try to argue in the…
It is an article of faith among the antivaccine movement that vaccines are degrading the health of our children, such that vaccines cause autism, asthma, diabetes, and a number of other chronic diseases. You won't have to look far on most antivaccine websites to find claims that today's children are the sickest in history and insinuations, if not outright statements, that vaccines are at least part ofthe cause. If you've been following the antivaccine movement as long as I have (more than a decade) or even if you've only been following it one tenth as long, you are probably aware that one of…
I've been at this blogging thing for more than a decade now. Looking back on those years, I find it incredible that I've lasted this long. For one thing, I still marvel that there are apparently thousands of people out there who still like to read my nearly daily musings (or, as George Carlin would call them, brain droppings) after all these years. More importantly, being a public advocate for science is a rough business, as I've documented over the years. Back when I first started out, I was completely pseudonymous and anonymous. I kept my real name relatively secret. It was less than five…
I was measured, science-based, and reasonable in yesterday's post about the new American Cancer Society guidelines for screening mammography (which is obviously why that post garnered so few comments, thus teaching me my lesson yet again0, but regular readers know that I can be quite obnoxious and sarcastic and there's a reason why this blog is called Respectful Insolence. It's based on a quote from a character (a computer, actually) in a 35 year old British science fiction series. That character, Orac, is my namesake, and the adopted quote is, "A statement of fact cannot be insolent." Of…
Anger is an energy, as a certain old punk sang back in the 1980s. It can even be a great motivator, such as when anger overtakes us for injustice or over crimes. Anger, however, is not a particularly good intellectual tool, nor does it help in analyzing science. Which reminds me: J.B. Handley is back. You have to be a bit of a long time reader—OK, a really long time reader—to remember that Mr. Handley's antics used to be a regular topic of this blog. After all, he and his wife were the founders of a long-standing antivaccine group, Generation Rescue. It was an antivaccine group founded on the…
Homeopathy is The One Quackery To Rule Them All. There, I've started off this post the way I start off most posts about homeopathy, with a statement of just how enormous a pile of pseudoscientific (or rather prescientific) quackery that it is. You'd think that in 2015 no one would believe that diluting a substance (with vigorous shaking between each serial dilution step, of course, in order to "potentize" it) makes its effects stronger or that water has some sort of mystical "memory" that remembers the therapeutic substance but forgets all the other impurities, chemicals, and urine with which…
I sometimes catch flak for repeating this, but there was a time when I thought there might be something to acupuncture. I don't care, because, as a blogger, when I write a post I assume that a significant fraction of people reading it have never seen this blog before and therefore aren't even the least bit familiar with what I've written before on the subject. That makes them a blank slate, as far as this blog is concerned, and obliges me to explain everything. That time was about nine or ten years ago, and my rationale was, not surprisingly, that, unlike many other alternative medicine…