Pseudoscience
oracknows | May 12, 2017Normally, I like to mix up my topics, but it's been one of those weeks where basically discussing the antivaccine movement has taken over. Sometimes when that happens, I just go with the flow. Besides, there really is one more story involving that antivaccine movement that I want to comment on. Remember last week, when the story of how the antivaccine movement had targeted Somali immigrants in Minnesota, with a resultant plunge in MMR uptake among that population over the last decade. Completely unsurprisingly, given that MMR uptake among the Somalis fell from 92% to 42% in over a decade,…
oracknows | May 10, 2017Over the last couple of days, I've been writing about two incredibly bad "studies" by Anthony Mawson, an antivaccinationist and Andrew Wakefield fanboi, who first published one of them in a bottom-feeding predatory open access journal and saw it retracted. Then he appears to have divided the study up two minimal publishable units and had them published as two papers in a bottom-feeding predatory open access journal even lower on the food chain that the first, after having promoted its second coming among the antivaccine crowd. Obviously, I'm not going to go into the details of each study's…
oracknows | May 7, 2017Some posts I really enjoy doing. I'm so fired up by the topic that the words flow, and I finish a post in record time. Other posts are more of a chore, written not so much because I'm excited by the topic, but because I feel duty bound to address it. I feel the need to write such posts when, for example, a bit of pseudoscience has gained traction in mainstream groups and readers keep writing me about it, to the point where I finally give in. This is one of the latter posts. None of this is to say that I don't still do my best with these posts to explain and argue my points. Fear not, I'll get…
oracknows | May 5, 2017Earlier this week, I took note of an ongoing measles outbreak in Minnesota. This outbreak affects the large Somali immigrant community there, and the reason for the outbreak is simple. Over the last decade, uptake of the MMR vaccine has plunged dramatically in the American-born children of the Somali community, from 92% to 42%, far below the level necessary for herd immunity. The reason for the drop is that antivaccine fear mongering has taken hold in the community, thanks to American antivaxers who targeted the community and Andrew Wakefield himself, who's visited the community at least…
oracknows | May 4, 2017I'm having flashbacks now. I feel as though it's 2012, and I was just in the midst of examining the Houston cancer quack known as Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. As you recall, he's the Polish expat doctor who discovered peptides in the blood that he dubbed "antineoplastons" and postulated to be endogenous cancer suppressors. He ultimately made them into a cancer treatment that he's been using on patients for over 40 years now, despite never having demonstrated its efficacy or safety. Despite that, he's become a rock star in the world of alternative cancer cures, with two propaganda movies disguised…
oracknows | May 3, 2017[Editor's note: Sorry this is a few hours late. I forgot to change the status from DRAFT to SCHEDULE in WordPress last night. D'oh!]
The single most persuasive strategies by which quacks sell their wares and believers in quackery persuade others to try the quackery they believe in is the personal anecdote. Indeed, I established very early on in the history of this blog a type of post that has become a staple that shows up several times a year. In these posts, I deconstruct "alternative cancer cure" testimonials, showing how the story as related doesn't provide convincing evidence that the…
oracknows | April 30, 2017There are many harms attributable to the antivaccine movement and its promotion of antivaccine beliefs. Certainly, the harm those of us who have been combatting antivaccine misinformation fear is the return of vaccine-preventable diseases, which is something we've seen in the form of outbreaks, such as the Disneyland measles outbreak two years ago and, in my own state, pertussis outbreaks. The Disneyland outbreak was a wake-up call to California legislators, who in its wake passed SB 277, a law that eliminated personal belief exemptions (PBEs) to school vaccine requirements. Now, only medical…
oracknows | April 24, 2017Ever since I first realized that naturopathy is a cornucopia of quackery administered by naturopaths in a "One from Column A, Two from Column B"-style of practice, I've opposed the licensure of naturopaths. Not surprisingly, naturopaths crave state licensure because it puts the imprimatur of the state on their pseudomedical profession. More importantly, it makes it more likely that health insurance companies will actually pay for their services. Unfortunately, thus far, 19 states, five Canadian provinces, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands have all passed laws…
oracknows | April 23, 2017Anyone who has been reading this blog for the last three years or so knows that I'm not a fan of "right-to-try" laws. Basically such laws, which have sprung up like kudzu since 2014 and now exist in 33 states, purport to allow terminally ill patients the "right to try" experimental therapeutics. Thus far, they have been sold to the public as giving terminally ill patients "one last shot" and touting how such laws could save lives. As a result, as I've grimly quipped on multiple occasions, to politicians opposing right-to-try laws is akin to opposing motherhood, apple pie, and the American…
oracknows | April 21, 2017Yesterday, I discussed a topic that has vexed me ever since long before I started this blog, namely the topic of how physicians are seduced by pseudoscience and ultimately embrace it whole-heartedly. The kinds of pseudoscience I've seen physicians embracing are many, including climate science denialism and creationism, but the ones that most interest me are ones that physicians should know better than to embrace. I'm referring, of course, to pseudoscience related to the medical profession, such as various forms of medical quackery (which, alas, have found all too cozy a home in medicine to…
oracknows | April 19, 2017Being a surgeon and physician, I've always been puzzled at how my fellow physicians and surgeons can become ensnared by pseudoscience and quackery to the point where they become proponents of various forms of irrational thinking. Examining "docs gone bad" has been an intermittent recurring theme of this blog going all the way back to at least 2005. Leaving aside obvious quacks, such as some of the cancer quacks I've discussed over the years, I've discussed a number of doctors who don't accept the validity of evolution, the most commonly discussed being Dr. Michael Egnor, the creationist…
oracknows | April 18, 2017If there's one thing about antivaxers, it's that they're single-minded beyond belief. No matter what the chronic health problem, it's always about the vaccines. To them, vaccines are always the cause. Autism? Vaccines must be the cause. Asthma? vaccines. Diabetes? Obviously vaccines. Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)? What else could it be but the vaccines? (Never mind that there's plenty of evidence suggesting that vaccinated children have a lower risk of SIDS.) That's how antivaxers think. Monomania doesn't even begin to describe it.
I was reminded of this yesterday when I came across yet…
oracknows | April 14, 2017As hard as it is to believe, I've been writing about the antivaccine movement for over 12 years now, and dealing with it online for close to 17 years. If there's one thing that all that exposure to the pseudoscience, logical fallacies, misinformation, and outright hatred spewed forth by antivaccine activists on a daily basis, it's that language matters. Antivaxers know this and are constantly trying to twist language to their ends. For instance, other than hard core antivaxers who are refreshingly honest, most antivaxers really, really hate being called "antivaccine." I like to think it's…
oracknows | April 13, 2017The Disneyland measles outbreak began over the Christmas holidays of 2014 and continued for several months into 2015, ultimately spanning eight states and two additional countries (Canada and Mexico). It also represented a seismic shift in the battle to contain the malign influence of the antivaccine movement in that the outbreak centered the Magic Kingdom made it possible for California legislators to do something that would definitely not have been possible before the outbreak: Pass a law outlawing "personal belief exemptions" (a.k.a. nonmedical exemptions) to school vaccine requirements.…
oracknows | April 12, 2017Yesterday, I wrote about the case of Jade Erick, a 30-year-old woman whose death was caused by naturopathic quackery. It's not entirely clear if it was intravenous turmeric that killed her. That's what the press consistently reported. It's more likely that it was intravenous curcumin, which is derived from turmeric. Whatever the case, Erick very rapidly went into cardiac arrest as the infusion began. When first I discussed the Erick case, the identity of the naturopath was unknown because, for whatever reason, the press was not reporting it at the time. But yesterday the naturopath was…
oracknows | April 10, 2017March seemed to be naturopathic quackery month. Let's face it, though, every month is naturopathic quackery month. It's just that in March there were two stories that really caught my eye. The first was the story of a naturopath in Bowling Green named Juan Sanchez, who was gunned down in his office one Friday evening, allegedly by the distraught widower of a cancer patient whom he had treated, after having told her and her husband that "chemo is for losers" and claiming that he could eliminate her cancer in three months.
The second was even more shocking. Basically, a naturopath in Encinitas…
oracknows | April 4, 2017Last week, I took note of something that antivaxers hadn't done in nine years, specifically a "march on Washington." Back in 2008, Jenny McCarthy and her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey led a rag tag rogues' gallery of antivaccine activists on a march and rally that they called "Green Our Vaccines." The name of the rally, of course, derived from a common trope beloved of antivaccine activists that I like to refer to as the "toxin gambit." It's basically a Food Babe-like fear of those "evil chemicals" writ large in a claim that vaccines are packed full of horrific chemicals that are Making Our…
oracknows | April 2, 2017It's been a while since I've written about the burgeoning business of selling marijuana as a cure for whatever ails you. As I've written before, there exists a mystical faith that is very much like herbalism that marijuana is a magical plant that can cure, well, almost anything, including cancer, glaucoma, autism, ADHD, and many other conditions, when in fact the evidence is rather shaky for most, if not all, of these claims. Regarding cancer, the usual claim is not that smoking marijuana cures the disease, but rather that cannabis oil isolated from marijuana cures cancer, a claim that Rick…
oracknows | March 31, 2017Yesterday, I wrote about an antivaccine "march on Washington." As is often the case with antivaccine rhetoric, if you listened to the people organizing the conference and planning to speak there, you'd think that they were fighting an apocalyptic battle for the very future of the human race. Certainly, Kent Heckenlively seems to think so. I'm not going to write about this march again, at least not today. It's too soon. I don't know how ridiculous, how pathetic it was, mainly because, as I write this, it hasn't happened yet. What I can write about is something I came across while researching…
oracknows | March 28, 2017After yesterday's post on a local news station's credulous promotion of quack acupuncture (but I repeat myself) for pets, I thought I'd stay on the topic of acupuncture for one more day. The reason is that a reader sent me a link to an article in Stars and Stripes that really irritated me, Acupuncture becomes popular as battlefield pain treatment. Longtime readers might remember that I've been writing about the utter ridiculousness and lack of science behind "battlefield acupuncture" and how it makes no sense to be sticking recently wounded soldiers with needles under battlefield conditions.…