Quackery
oracknows | September 7, 2007Hot on the heels of the first Orac-free Skeptics' Circle in two years, amazingly, another Skeptics' Circle is coming around the pike far faster than I would have expected. This time around, it will be hosted by a most able blogger, Brent Rasmussen over at the very prominent skeptical blog, Unscrewing the Unscrutable. Brent's hosted once before, but that was over two years ago. I'm glad to have him back hosting and hope that he doesn't take such a long time before hosting yet again. In any case, Brent's posted instructions for submitting your best skeptical blogging to his edition of the…
oracknows | September 7, 2007
I debated about whether to do Your Friday Dose of Woo this week.
I really wasn't sure if I was up to it. As regular readers know, I was on vacation in London during the last week in August. Unfortunately, I returned to the news of a death in the family on my wife's side, making the last few days a seriously saddening time. I even tried to keep blogging through it as a release to take my mind off of things, but, as the last two days showed, I reached the point where that didn't work anymore. I guess it's a good thing there's still quite a bit of stuff to be mined from the old blog archives…
oracknows | September 6, 2007Due to a death in the family, I have to go back into the vaults of the old blog for some more reposts. Regular blogging should resume in a day or two. This particular post first appeared on February 1, 2006.
Here's something I wish there was more of, the criminal prosecution of quacks when their quackery results in the death of a patient:
A man who called himself a naturopathic doctor is scheduled to stand trial for the death of one of his patients starting Tuesday in Jefferson County District Court in Golden, Colo.
Brian O'Connell, 37, was charged with manslaughter after he unsuccessfully…
oracknows | September 4, 2007While I've been having a little fun with homeopathy today, I thought I'd show you just one other thing about the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. Directly in front of the hospital, I noticed some words on the street. After taking a closer look, I was shocked and horrified. Take a look for yourself:
If you can't tell what all of the lettering says, it reads:
AMBULANCES ONLY KEEP CLEAR
It's an ambulance spot right in front of the Homeopathic Hospital. I really hope that these are only elective transports. I can't imagine emergency transports to a homeopathic hospital. Well, actually, I can…
oracknows | September 4, 2007A couple of weeks ago, before I went on vacation, the BBC aired a two-part documentary by Richard Dawkins entitled The Enemies of Reason. Part One dealt primarily with the paranormal and various New Age phenomena, while Part Two, which aired mere days before my London trip, dealt squarely with alternative medicine in an uncompromising fashion. One key segment of Part Two discussed the bizarre magical thinking that is known as homeopathy. Although I quibbled a bit about certain aspects of how Dawkins presented homeopathy, overall I thought it was the best deconstruction on video of the…
oracknows | September 3, 2007John is sick and tired of antievolutionists. Who can blame him? As he points out, they are utterly immune to evidence or reason:
I was wrong. Very wrong. Information isn't what makes people change their minds. Experience is, and generally nobody has much experience of the facts of biology that underwrite evolution. The so-called "deficit model" of the public understanding of science, which assumes that all they need is more information, is false.
I could also point out that this is the very reason that alternative medicine to this day so regularly trumps scientific, evidence-based medicine in…
oracknows | September 2, 2007An excellent op-ed article by Michael Fitzpatrick characterizes quite well the hysterical fear based on no evidence that Andrew Wakefield and his accomplices started in the U.K. over the MMR vaccine and the unfounded claim that it causes autism and bowel disorders:
The rise of a combination of extreme scepticism towards established sources of authority in science and medicine and anxiety about environmental threats to our wellbeing has led many to put their faith in self-proclaimed mavericks and alternative healers and charlatans. The recent outbreaks of measles, which resulted last year in…
oracknows | August 30, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on July 20, 2005. This one seems downright prescient as I read it again. Enjoy!
Today in Washington, there will be a march, called (with unintentional irony) the Power of Truth march. Its organizers claim that it will be to "protest the use of mercury in vaccines" (never mind that the mercury was taken out of nearly all vaccines in the U.S…
oracknows | August 29, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on December 27, 2005. Enjoy!
Since the very beginning of this blog, I've said that I'd love to see "alternative" medicine treated on equal footing with conventional medicine. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean what alties think it does. When I say "equal footing," I don't necessarily mean that alt-med should be treated with equal…
oracknows | August 28, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on February 10, 2005. Enjoy!
A few days ago, I had been thinking that it's been a long time since I've blogged about alternative medicine. I was going over a list of potential topics, debating whether I should talk about alt-med in general or pick specific "therapies." And then, there it was, sitting in the in-box on my desk at work, a…
oracknows | August 27, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on December 21, 2005 Enjoy!
When you blog about a certain topic long enough and post strong opinions about it often enough, you start to gain a reputation as one of the go-to bloggers on that particular topic, whether you originally intended it that way or not. Consequently, I wasn't too suprised when a reader sent me a piece by another blogger…
oracknows | August 27, 2007Even when I'm on vacation, lots of other great bloggers aren't. The lack of writing on my part makes it even easier for me to point you in the direction of posts likely to be of interest to my readers. Fortunately Prometheus has started posting again after one of his all-too-frequent hiatuses, and here are two of his recent posts worth checking out:
Another nail in the coffin
Myths and Legends of Autism: Part 1, The Myth of the Poor Excretor
oracknows | August 27, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off to London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on December 19, 2005. I don't know if Bill Maher is still an antivax nutcase, but I'm guessing that he probably is. Enjoy!
Via Skeptico, I've learned of some more antivaccination stupidity issuing forth from self-proclaimed "skeptic" Bill Maher during his recent appearance on Larry King Live. Get a load of this:
MAHER: I'm not into…
oracknows | August 26, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on July 25, 2005 . Although the Undead Führer himself has made only one appearance, but the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster became. Enjoy!
As for all the Hitler Zombie reruns, don't worry. I decided to do that over the weekend, and now I'll change to reposts of different topics for a while.
In the most recent issue…
oracknows | August 26, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on July 6, 2005 and is the very first time ever that the Hitler Zombie appeared in a horror story form. As such, it was a landmark day in the annals of Respectful Insolence. Appropriately enough, it's over what had become a frequent blogging topic even back in those early days. Enjoy!
Deep within a dark crypt, far beneath the ground, it slept. The…
oracknows | August 22, 2007Good news! Dr. Roy Kerry, the quack whose careless use of intravenous chelation therapy for autism resulted in the death of a five year old autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama, will be charged with involuntary manslaughter:
PITTSBURGH - A doctor was charged with involuntary manslaughter Wednesday for administering a chemical treatment that state police say killed a 5-year-old autistic boy.
The child, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, went into cardiac arrest at Dr. Roy E. Kerry's office immediately after undergoing chelation therapy on Aug. 23, 2005.
Chelation removes heavy metals from the body…
oracknows | August 22, 2007Fellow SB'er Tara Smith, and academic neurologist Steve Novella have written an essential primer on the dangerous pseudoscience and quackery that is HIV/AIDS denialism. It's published in PLoS and is entitled HIV Denial in the Internet Era.
It makes a number of excellent points about the deadly quackery that is HIV/AIDS denialism, including how its advocates portray science as "faith," shift the goalposts when asking for evidence for the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, and in general engage in all the same sorts of logical and scientific fallacies beloved by pseudoscientists and cranks like creationists…
oracknows | August 17, 2007So, after nearly two weeks of torturing myself trying to put together an R01-level grant on short notice and make it actually competitive, I'm finally free. The grant has been submitted (amazingly, the online submission process went through without a hitch), and, sleep-deprived but still hopped up on the Sudafed that kept the mucus membranes in my nasal passages from exploding outward at a high velocity, scattering watery goo everywhere.
Not a pretty sight when it happens, hence the Sudafed.
Fortunately, the pollen has subsided to the level where I am only mildly miserable, allowing my…
oracknows | August 16, 2007Yes!
As intelligent and powerful as he is, Orac has always lacked something, and that's mobility. He's always been more or less at the mercy of the humans with whom he travels when it comes to locomotion. In short, being a clear box of blinking lights, he has to be carried everywhere, sometimes in a rather undignified fashion:
In this week's edition of the Skeptics' Circle, Bronze Dog gives Orac exactly what he needs:
Yes, a giant robot! Controlling such awesome machinery directly, finally, Orac is unshackled from his dependence on irrational humans to take him where he wants to go!…
oracknows | August 16, 2007It's here, and it's on Google Video. I watched it last night, and it was a blistering attack on the irrationality that is so common in our society:
Part I begins with Richard Dawkins sitting in on some sort of New Age chanting ceremony (the discomfited look on his face is priceless to watch), after which he goes to a New Age fair, and concludes with an attack on the crappy science that lead to the MMR vaccine scare over autism in the U.K. In between, Dawkins takes on astrology, dowsers, spiritualists, and mediums, no holds barred.
Next Monday: Richard Dawkins versus alternative medicine.…