Pseudoscience
oracknows | February 18, 2009Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even if I did my wife needs me more. Because I foresaw this coming, however, I do have a series of "Best of" reposts lined up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other than maybe a brief update or two…
oracknows | February 11, 2009Stick a fork in Keith Olbermann. He's done.
He has now officially degenerated into a liberal version of Rush Limbaugh, except that Rush Limbaugh is occasionally funny. Maybe he's more like Sean Hannity, particularly in his apparent dedication to the truth, or, rather, lack thereof. Hannity detests liberals and will immediately attack on the slightest pretense, even if the information given to him of "liberal wrongdoing" is dubious or outright wrong. Like Hannity, Olbermann will never turn down an opportunity to attack Bill O'Reilly or his paymaster Rupert Murdoch. Somtimes it's justified, but…
oracknows | February 10, 2009Because of the fallout from the revelation by Brian Deer that very likely Andrew Wakefield, hero of the antivaccine movement but, alas for his worshipers, one of the most dishonest and incompetent scientists who ever lived, had almost certainly falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that launched a decade-long anti-MMR hysteria that shows no signs of abating, I ended up not coming back to a story I was very interested in. Although this story is about Holocaust denial, the questions raised by it are applicable not only to history and Holocaust denial, but to any area of science or…
oracknows | February 9, 2009I should have seen this one coming.
After all, the economy's been in the crapper for several months now. Things are bad and getting worse, with the bottom not yet in sight. So who could prosper in this environment, except for repo men and liquor stores?
Psychics, of course:
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The housing crisis will deepen, the country could fall into a depression and laid-off workers may need to start their own business.
New York psychic Roxanne Usleman says the bad economy had been good for her business.
If this sounds like the advice of a financial planner or an economist, think again. It's…
oracknows | February 2, 2009I love Tim Minchin.
I also totally understand where he's coming from when it comes to confronting woo, though, as I've described here. In any case, see Tim in action (parts may be NSFW due to profanity):
Enjoy, as I'm running a bit late in producing my usual content for Monday. Fear not, it's coming later today!
oracknows | January 15, 2009P.Z. Myers turned me on to a phenomenal proposal at Change.gov, the website of President-Elect Barack Obama's transition team:
Defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine:
Here's a way to increase the available funding to NIH without increasing the NIH budget: halt funding to NCCAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This Center was created not by scientists, who never thought it was a good idea, but by Congress, and specifically by just two Congressmen in the 1990's who believed in particular "alternative" (but scientifically dubious)…
oracknows | December 31, 2008Yesterday, I commented on the tragic death of HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore, who was HIV-positive herself and refused to use antiretroviral drugs during her pregnancy to prevent maternal-fetal transmission of the virus and insisted on breast feeding even though the virus can be transmitted to the baby through breast milk. Her cultish clinging to the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS against all scientific evidence showing otherwise cost her daughter her life in 2005 and, very likely, cost her her own life a few days ago. I concede that it is quite possible that Maggiore did not die…
oracknows | December 30, 2008Longtime readers of this blog may remember the case of Eliza Jane Scovill. For newbies and those who might not remember, I've copiously linked to posts written by me and others.
To boil it all down, three years ago a child named Eliza Jane Scovill (often called EJ) died tragically three years ago of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and HIV-associated encephalopathy. The reason is that her mother, Christine Maggiore, was a prominent HIV/AIDS denialist, who, after having been found to be HIV positive back in the early 1990s fell under the sway of Peter Duesberg and came to believe that HIV does…
oracknows | December 26, 2008...more not-so-Respectful Insolence, courtesy not of Orac this time but of other skeptical physician-bloggers!
Enjoy:
Smackdown, please (yes, Egnor, I'm talking to you) (by blog bud PalMD)
Defending science-based medicine (by skeptical neurologist Dr. Steve Novella, who's been known to spar a bit with Dr. Egnor himself over evolution and neuroscience)
Egnorance is Bliss (by Dr. Kimball Atwood IV)
oracknows | December 23, 2008I'm happy to say, I've never watched an episode of The Doctors, at least if the episode segment I've just been sent is any indication of the quality of the science and medicine discussed on the TV show. The episode, which aired on December 11, featured a segment on autism featuring an old "friend" of the blog. The fact that he was featured on a television show ostensibly designed to discuss medicine and make it accessible to a general audience tells me that not only the producers but the physicians who do the show are utterly without a clue. No, it wasn't J.B. Handley or Jenny McCarthy, but…
oracknows | December 19, 2008I'm a connoisseur of woo.
It's true. Back when I first started blogging, I came across outrageous bits of pseudoscience such as the ones I feature periodically on Your Friday Dose of Woo, and I wasn't sure quite what to do with them. Indeed, I had a hard time deciding if some of them were massive Sokal-type hoaxes or evenif the person writing them really believed in them. Of course, I had a lot of fun taking them on. How could I not? After all, what else can one make of something like, for example, DNA Activation or "healing sounds," or even for that matter that unholy alliance of…
oracknows | December 15, 2008Three goodies on skepticism and science:
Skeptical Battlegrounds: Part III - Alternative Medicine. Suffice it to say, Steve agrees with me. He just lays it all out in one post instead of ten.
Once again, Egnor and Tautologies. Blogchild Mark Chu-Carroll takes on our favorite creationist neurosurgeon, Dr. Egnor. This time he deals directly with something I've touched upon recently: Egnor's false labeling of the theory of evolution as a tautology.
Alternative Medicine's Rapid Spread? Nonsense. Oddly enough, Avery Camarow, whose articles I've taken issue with before for credulity towards the…
oracknows | December 15, 2008Several months ago, I wrote a post about the experimentation with acupuncture by an Air Force physician, Col. Robert Niemtzow. In the post, I started with an admittedly exaggerated vignette--a story, if you will--of a soldier whose leg was shredded by a mortar in battle. When the medic came to treat his wounds and get him ready for transport, this soldier was in for a surprise, because after applying a tourniquet to his leg, this medic offered him not morphine for his pain but acupuncture. At the time, the military acupuncture program spearheaded by Col. Niemtzow was not proposing anything…
oracknows | December 4, 2008It may well be; Roger Ebert has finally gotten around to reviewing Expelled! Short version: He didn't like it.
Long version: He really, really didn't like it.
I knew there was a reason I liked Roger Ebert.
oracknows | December 2, 2008Well, it looks as though I've stepped into it yet one more time.
Believe it or not, I hadn't intended to stir up trouble among the ScienceBlogs collective, both English- and German-speaking. Really. Oh, I'll admit that there are occasionally times when I actually do mean to stir up trouble. One recent example is when it was rumored that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might be chosen to be Secretary of the Interior or, even worse, Director of the EPA. Much to my surprise, I actually did manage to stir up a goodly amount of blogospheric reaction, too. Although I believed it to be a good cause, this…
oracknows | November 26, 2008Here we go again.
Every so often, one of the--shall we say?--less popular members of our crew of science bloggers, someone who, despite being an academic whose area of expertise is ostensibly science communication, has stepped in it again. I'm referring, of course to Matt Nisbet. Only this time, it's not him lecturing us just on how to combat creationism. No, this time around, he isn't limiting himself to just that, although that is what he made his name doing, around the blogosphere anyway. This time around, he's perturbed at a certain word, a certain term that we skeptics sometimes feel…
oracknows | November 25, 2008As I sat down on the couch in front of the TV last night to do my nightly blogging ritual, trying to tickle the gray matter to come up with the pearls of wisdom or insolence that my readers have come to know and love, I had a fantastic idea for a serious consideration of a question that comes up in the discussion of science and pseudoscience and how to combat pseudoscience. It would be serious and sober. It would be highly relevant to the interests of my readers. It would rival anything I've ever written for this blog before.
I ended up writing this instead. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow. Besides…
oracknows | November 22, 2008Well, this is depressing to learn. I'd be even more depressed if I were Canadian. All I can say to my neighbors to the north is that I feel your pain, albeit belatedly. I just learned that the recently appointed Minister of State for Science and Technology within Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Cabinet is Gary Goodyear. So what's the big deal?
Gary Goodyear is an chiropractor. Not only that, but he's an acupuncturist, too. Nothing like putting someone who believes in pseudoscience in charge of science and technology. I wonder how that will work out.
Now, for Harper's next appointment, let's…
oracknows | November 13, 2008
The things I do for my readers.
I'm referring to a movie entitled The Beautiful Truth, links to whose website and trailers several of you have e-mailed to me over the last couple of weeks. Maybe it's because the movie is only showing in New York and Los Angeles and hasn't made it out of the media enclaves of those cities out to the rest of us in flyover country, or maybe its release is so limited that I just hadn't heard of it. Certainly that appears to be the case, as the schedule shown at the website lists it as beginning an engagement in New York tomorrow and running through November 20…
oracknows | November 10, 2008I had been planning on taking on a couple of articles about breast cancer to start out the week. However, between having to deal with a tsunami of leaves before Monday, when the giant trucks come along to pick them up today and a number of other issues, I didn't have time. As much as I love taking a recent study and doing an in-depth analysis, such posts take probably twice as much time for me to do as the average post. Unfortunately, various issues this weekend prevented that, at least for today.
Fortunately, there's always homeopathy.
Yes, homeopathy is always there for the easy post. Even…