Quackery
oracknows | January 23, 2007The commentary on the Arthur Allen-David Kirby debate is coming in fast and furious. The latest is this excellent deconstruction of Kirby's parroting of the claim that autistic children are "poor excretor's" of mercury. I guess I can say that Dad of Cameron took this one on so that I don't have to...
oracknows | January 23, 2007Well, it's finally been posted, video of the debate between Arthur Allen, author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver (a book that I am about 2/3 of the way through and plan on reviewing before the end of the month if possible) and mercury militia vaccine fearmonger David Kirby, author of Evidence of Harm and arguably one of the two people who have done more than anyone else to bring the bogus claim that mercury in vaccines is the cause of the increase in the number of diagnoses of autism over the last 15 years or so to a wider audience. (The other is Robert F…
oracknows | January 17, 2007Drat! Real life has once again interfered with my blogging. Fortunately, there's still a lot of what I consider to be good stuff in the archives of the old blog that has yet to be transferred to the new blog. Today looks like a perfect time to transfer at least a couple more articles from the old blog. This particular article first appeared on January 12, 2006. For those who haven't seen it before, pretend I just wrote it. For those who have, savor its Insolence once again.
I was perusing some journals yesterday, including the most recent issue of Nature, when I came across a rather…
oracknows | January 17, 2007Drat! Real life has once again interfered with my blogging. Fortunately, there's still a lot of what I consider to be good stuff in the archives of the old blog that has yet to be transferred to the new blog. Today looks like a perfect time to transfer at least a couple more articles from the old blog. This particular article first appeared on April 25, 2005. One reason I reposted it is that I recently forgot the very precepts that I discussed in it when over the holidays a relative brought up the topic of Sylvia Browne, provoking a clearly too vigorous response about her being a fraud. (…
oracknows | January 13, 2007In a warmup for his "debate" later today in LaJolla, CA with Arthur Allen, David Kirby spews the usual pseudoscience again. I can't believe he's still making the long debunked "autism has the same symptoms as mercury poisoning" statement with a straight face, and then continuing to parrot the same old "mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism" and the same fallacy of equating correlation with causation by claiming that, because autism increased in the 1990's at the same time when more vaccines were being added to the childhood vaccination schedule.
I'm not sure why the video is cut…
oracknows | January 12, 2007The other day, as is my wont every week, I was perusing my Folder of Woo, the folder on my computer in which I keep a bunch of URLs leading to many potential targets for Your Friday Dose of Woo, looking for this week's victim. I had one all picked out, too, but for some reason it just wasn't getting the woo-inator going enough to inspire me to do what is expected every week. Not that it wasn't good woo, even really good woo. It just wasn't great woo, and YFDoW just hasn't been around long enough for me to settle for anything less than the greatest, finest, tastiest woo just yet. Or maybe it…
oracknows | January 9, 2007Inspired by the story of the faith healer who claimed that Jesus cured her of a breast cancer she in fact never had and, it turned out, who also claimed that faith had healed her brother of a terminal cancer and covered up the fact that he was dying while promoting her book, here's a proposed cure for televangelists who claim they can cure disease through the power of prayer:
New York - (Ass Mess): A team of plastic surgeons, clinical psychatrists and orthodontists has patented a radical procedure that cures evangelical preachers from claiming Jesus is more effective at healing cancer than…
oracknows | January 8, 2007It was just last week that I was made aware of the sad news that Katie Wernecke, the 14-year-old girl with Hodgkin's lymphoma whose parents' battle to reject radiation therapy and additional chemotherapy made national news in 2005 and who ultimately went for high dose vitamin C therapy at an altie clinic in Kansas, had relapsed. (Even now, altie vultures are advertising their wares in the comments of the post in which Katie's father announced her relapse, and chastising a lone MD who posted a comment begging the family to try conventional medicine while there's still a chance.) As regular…
oracknows | January 6, 2007Before I move on to other topics, I can't resist one last comment about the corrupt and sleazy Andrew Wakefield, the man who, with the help of heaping piles of cash from lawyers, almost singlehandedly produced a scare over the possibility that the MMR vaccine causes autism so large that vaccination rates in the U.K. fell precipitously, leading to massive misery due to a resurgence of the diseases prevented by the MMR vaccine and at least one death. Brian Deer, as you may know, is the journalist who exposed the disgusting underbelly of Wakefield's activities and who also broke the story of…
oracknows | January 6, 2007In case anyone from Southern California of a skeptical bent is interested in attending the debate about whether thimerosal in vaccines causes autism, here is the event information that I mentioned yesterday:
Vaccines and Autism, Is There a Connection?
A Thoughtful Debate
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Featuring:
David Kirby - Author, Evidence of Harm
and Arthur Allen - Author, Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver
Event Information:
Location: UC San Diego Price Center, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093
Time: Lecture & Debate 10:00am to 12:30pm
Reception &…
oracknows | January 5, 2007It's always a shame to see a once confident man reduced to whining. Well, maybe not always. Sometimes it's immensely satisfying, particularly when that man happens to be David Kirby, who, through his book Evidence of Harm, Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy, was one of the two men most responsible for publicizing the pseudoscientific scare-mongering that claims that mercury in thimerosal, the preservative that was until late 2002 used in childhood vaccines, causes autism. (The other was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) Unfortunately for poor ol' David, time and science…
oracknows | January 5, 2007It's back.
Yes, I was wondering what would be the best way to start out a brand new year of Your Friday Dose of Woo. Once again, as is all too unfortunately the case, there was an embarrassment of riches, a veritable cornucopia of woo out there, each one seemingly just as worthy of Orac's loving attention as the other. And, after having taken a week off from this, there was even a backup of woo. (I wonder if a little cleansing might be in order to relieve the backup.) Then it occurred to me. I started YFDoW with a very special treatment of some truly spectacular woo known as quantum…
oracknows | January 4, 2007You know, like the namesake of my nom de blog, I'm not immune to a little vanity. Indeed, I daresay that no human is. What differs among humans are two things: the level of vanity and what we're vain about. Given that I don't have all that much in the looks department going on, it's fortunate that I'm probably not as vain as my blog namesake. Even so, I like to think that I'm pretty intelligent and that possess close to the proper level of skepticism, being neither so credulous that I'm easily fooled nor so skeptical that it devolves into cynicism. Consequently, when someone apparently thinks…
oracknows | January 2, 2007Believe it or not, there are times when I really, really wish I weren't right.
No, I'm not implying that I'm right so much of the time that I wish I were wrong more often. I'm human and therefore perfectly capable of being wrong, sometimes spectacularly so. (Of course, as we all know, that sort of thing rarely happens on this blog, right? Right?) But sometimes, even as I know I'm right about something, deep down I hope that I'm not. Usually such cases involve watching patients choosing alternative medicine reach the point where they have to the consequences of their choice. Despite all my…
oracknows | January 1, 2007This should come as no surprise. Thanks to Brian Deer, the journalist who uncovered so much of Dr. Andew Wakefield's shady research and dealings, we now know that Wakefield was paid by lawyers before his infamous MMR study and that he failed to disclose this clear conflict of interest:
ANDREW WAKEFIELD, the former surgeon whose campaign linking the MMR vaccine with autism caused a collapse in immunisation rates, was paid more than £400,000 by lawyers trying to prove that the vaccine was unsafe.
The payments, unearthed by The Sunday Times, were part of £3.4m distributed from the legal aid…
oracknows | December 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 30, 2005 and is the followup to the first article I did (reposted earlier today). I debated whether to repost…
oracknows | December 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 21, 2005 and is the first of a two-part discussion of what has come to be known as the Al-Bayati Report. Part 2…
oracknows | December 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 22, 2005.
A couple of months ago, there was a minor dust-up here regarding an unfortunate autistic boy who died…
oracknows | December 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 5, 2006.
Remember how I said yesterday that I was going to post something today that I had been planning since…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 25, 2006
I hate spammers.
On the scale of Internet scumbags, spammers rank just one notch above pedophiles (barely…