Quackery
oracknows | March 13, 2007I'm on the record multiple times as saying that I reject the entire concept and nomenclature of "alternative medicine" as being distinct from "conventional" medicine as a false dichotomy, when in reality there should be just "medicine." Moreover, this "medicine" remaining should, whenever possible, be based on sound scientific and clinical trial evidence. In essence, I advocate treating "alternative" medicine the same as "conventional" medicine subjecting it to the same scientific process to determine whether it has efficacy or not, after which medicine that is effective is retained and used…
oracknows | March 10, 2007Well, not exactly "no comment." You know that Orac, being the annoyingly obnoxious skeptic that he is, has to put at least two cents in.
This one's just plain odd. I knew Rosie O'Donnell's not exactly the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, and she also borders on being a creduloid, at least with respect to almost buying the myth that mercury in vaccines causes autism (although she does get props for slapping down David Kirby) and waxing antivax about Gardasil, the new vaccine against human papilloma virus. But last week, she revealed that she has been using "inversion therapy" for years to…
oracknows | March 9, 2007It's Friday, which means that it's time once again to delve deeply into the world of woo, all for your edification and (I hope) education. Even though I started out with less motivation than usual for tending to the blog, it actually turned out to be yet another rather eventful and surprisingly productive week on the old blog, with topics ranging from plumbing the depths of antivaccination lunacy, to doing some nice straight science blogging about the anticancer drug dichloroacetate (which actually gave me some ideas for my research), to discussing the "individualization" of treatments in…
oracknows | March 7, 2007I've posted many times about the pseudoscience of the mercury militia, that group of parents, bolstered by those Don Quixotes tilting at the mercury windmills in the cause of extracting more money from the government to compensate "vaccine-injured" children with autism, Mark and David Geier. These and other luminaries of the mecury militia blame vaccines for lots of bad things, be it autism, immune problems, "autistic enterocolitis," and generalized "mercury toxicity," all the while asserting piously (and, most amazingly of all, with a straight face) that, oh no, they aren't in any way "…
oracknows | March 2, 2007I didn't get back home until late last night; unfortunately there was no time to do a segment of Your Friday Dose of Woo that was up to my standards. Fortunately, there's something that I've been holding in reserve for just such an occasion that fits right in. Long-timers may remember that, near the very beginning of my blog, I did a post entitled What is an altie? It was basically a Jeff Foxworthy-like listing of "You just might be an altie if..." statements that, I think, had a good point. For those of you not familiar with the term "altie," it was coined about three or four years ago on…
oracknows | February 28, 2007Another one has fallen.
Yes, another prestigious medical school has given in. First I lamented the decline in basic science education in medical schools. Then, I lamented even more the infiltration of woo into the curricula of far too many medical schools, spurred on by patient demand, a desire for a nice, high profit cash-on-the-barrelhead set of treatments, and, most depressing of all, the misguided and highly credulous advocacy of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA). Worse, my own alma mater, the University of Michigan, has infiltrated serious woo into its curriculum. But at…
oracknows | February 25, 2007Somehow, in all the blogging about dichloroacetate earlier this week, I somehow missed a mention of a truly annoying thing that the editors of Lancet Neurology did. In essence, they allowed ethically challenged mercury warrior Mark Geier a forum to review Richard Lathe's book Autism, Brain, and Environment.
Egads! How desperate wer the editors of Lancet Neurology for reviewers, that they'd let the biggest mercury-autism crank of all sully its pages with a dubious review of a rather fringe book?
Fortunately, Ben Goldacre's on the case. Money quote:
As I say, I'm not hostile to people like…
oracknows | February 24, 2007Remember how I alluded to the fact that perhaps I've been doing a little too much blogging about dichloroacetate and the unscrupulous "entrepreneurs" who are taking advantage of desperate cancer patients to sell the stuff to them? Well, I can't resist mentioning something truly amusing that I just noticed.
The "health freedom" warriors and "entrepreneurs" responsible for The DCA Site and BuyDCA.com appear to have noticed me and my humble efforts.
How do I know that they've noticed me? Remember the long exchange between Heather Nordstrom and two people questioning the ethics and legality of…
oracknows | February 22, 2007I've probably beat this one into the ground over the last couple of days; so this will be uncharacteristically brief, because it's time to move on. Also, it was fun to see DaveScot go into paroxysms to try to justify the dangerous, unethical, and reckless actions of Heather Nordstrom and her stepfather in setting up The DCA Site and its sister site, BuyDCA.com, where Heather et al are selling "Pet-DCA" in a ludicrously obvious (and probably ineffective) ploy to be able to claim to the FDA, "Hey, we're not selling this for human consumption." One wonders, perhaps, if DaveScot may actually have…
oracknows | February 21, 2007Yesterday, I wrote about how anti-science pro-"intelligent design" kook extraordinaire Dave Springer (a.k.a. DaveScot) has taken to promoting dichloroacetate as a treatment for cancer and one website in particular, The DCA Site that claims to exist to "help inform people of the exciting research done on DCA [dichloroacetate] by scientists at the University of Alberta. In January 2007 a team of scientists at the University of Alberta published a paper in the scientific journal Cancer Cell describing the discovery that a simple, cheap molecule, DCA, worked to reactivate the apoptosis mechanism…
oracknows | February 20, 2007I hadn't planned on writing about dichloroacetate, the inexpensive compound whose success in treating experimental cancer in rats that provoked a blogopheric storm about a "cancer cure" that would supposedly never see the light of day because it's not patentable. After all, I've done about seven posts on the topic, give or take a couple, in the course of the last four weeks or so. That's saturation blogging, and, really, nothing new has happened on the news front that merits a new post.
Or so I thought.
Then, like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III, just when I thought that I was out…
oracknows | February 9, 2007Apparently, while I've been at this meeting, Mayo Clinics Proceedings has published this systematic review of the scientific literature on the "efficacy" of homeopathy. Its conclusion:
The evidence from rigorous clinical trials of any type of therapeutic or preventive intervention testing homeopathy for childhood and adolescence ailments is not convincing enough for recommendations in any condition.
Actually, it would have been more accurate to say "not convincing at all." It's inevitably smaller, more poorly designed or non-randomized studies that purport to show treatment effects, which…
oracknows | February 9, 2007It's my last day in sunny Phoenix, and all I've done thus far is to go to conferences, work on a grant, and do a little blogging, usually late at night because I often have trouble falling asleep in hotel rooms, particularly given that the air conditioning always seems to be such that it's either too cold or too warm. I must be like Goldilocks, at least with respect to hotel heating/cooling systems, because it's always ridiculously hard for me to get it "just right."
In any case, I bet you were probably wondering if I'd pull off this week's Your Friday Dose of Woo. Actually, I wondered myself…
oracknows | February 7, 2007I happen to be in Phoenix today, attending the Academic Surgical Congress, where I actually have to present one of my abstracts. That means, between flying to Phoenix last night and preparing for my talk, I didn't have time to serve up a heapin' helping of that Respectful Insolence⢠you know and (hopefully) love. Fortunately, there's still a lot of stuff in the vaults of the old blog begging to be moved over to the new blog; so that's what I'll do today. I'll probably be back tomorrow, given that the conference will likely produce blog fodder. (Conferences usually do.) And, don't worry.…
oracknows | February 7, 2007I happen to be in Phoenix today, attending the Academic Surgical Congress, where I actually have to present one of my abstracts. That means, between flying to Phoenix last night and preparing for my talk, I didn't have time to serve up a heapin' helping of that Respectful Insolence⢠you know and (hopefully) love. Fortunately, there's still a lot of stuff in the vaults of the old blog begging to be moved over to the new blog; so that's what I'll do today. I'll probably be back tomorrow with new material, given that the conference will likely produce blog fodder. (Conferences usually do.) And…
oracknows | February 6, 2007I've written a lot about alternative medicine, much of which I consider to be woo; i.e., treatments for which there is no medical efficacy and the belief in which often requires magical thinking. I've expressed my disappointment in medical physicians who fall prey to and become purveyors or woo, doctors such as Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Joseph Mercola, those pushing to "integrate" woo into medical school curricula, and physicians who sell expensive "screening tests" such as breast MRI whose value has not been shown in valid, well-designed clinical trials. All of these activities represent, to me…
oracknows | February 5, 2007Pity poor David Kirby.
After all, he made his name by hitching his star to a losing hypothesis, namely that the mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. He wrote a book about it, Evidence of Harm, back in 2005 and has milked that sucker dry ever since. Most recently, his appearances culminated in a "debate" last month with Arthur Allen, whose book Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver just garnered a very favorable review in the New York Times, during which he did a most amusing dance around the issue by pointing to "other sources" of environmental mercury…
oracknows | February 1, 2007It's things like this over at Over My Med Body! that show our friend Graham really knows how to make a humble guy like Orac feel the love:
Big name bloggers like Orac and Dr. RW and KevinMD are all up in arms about how "medical schools are going the wrong way" and asking "Does anyone in academic medicine care about the integrity of medical education?" They like to talk about the fluffy "woo" of medical school, as if we're all hippies out in our commune who have sacrilegiously sacrificed our Evidence and Data to a golden cow.
Give. Me. A. Break.
They're whining as if this is the most…
oracknows | January 30, 2007Via Black Triangle, I'm made aware of another example of religious fundamentalism interfering with sound health care:
A MUSLIM doctors' leader has provoked an outcry by urging British Muslims not to vaccinate their children against diseases such as measles, mumps and rubella because it is "un-Islamic".
Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the Islamic Medical Association, is telling Muslims that almost all vaccines contain products derived from animal and human tissue, which make them "haram", or unlawful for Muslims to take.
Islam permits only the consumption of halal products, where the animal has…
oracknows | January 24, 2007At the risk of muscling in on Bronze Dog's territory, I've encountered a phenomenon that ought to be in his list of doggerel but doesn't appear to be. It appeared in the comments of my post about the Arthur Allen-David Kirby debate and my discussion of how the human tendency to see patterns where none really exist, coupled with the emotional investment the parents of autistic children have in their children and fueled by unscrupulous purveyors of harmful woo like Mark and David Geier, manages to keep the myth that mercury in vaccines is responsible for the "epidemic" of autism alive. My point…