Quackery
oracknows | August 2, 2006Here's something so obvious that it should have been done years ago:
WASHINGTON -- Unlike prescription drugmakers, manufacturers of vitamins, minerals and herbal remedies have no obligation to tell the Food and Drug Administration if consumers suffer serious side effects after taking their products.
That may soon change.
Legislation headed for a vote in the Senate would mandate for the first time that makers of dietary supplements and over-the-counter drugs inform the FDA when they learn of any serious adverse event linked to their products.
"The current reporting system is voluntary. It's…
oracknows | August 1, 2006I don't often do reader mailbag sorts of posts, but this question was so good that I thought it would be worth answering on the blog. Indeed, I almost thought of making this whole question another in my Friday Woo series, but decided that I wanted to answer it now.
Reader TB writes:
I've been following your blog for a few months now and love being both educated and entertained. The Friday Dose of Woo is great. While I have an idea of what you mean by woo it would be helpful to me and others visiting the page if you included a definition and perhaps the etymology.
My first temptation was to…
oracknows | July 31, 2006In the quiet and still of the crypt, something stirred. It was barely perceptible at first, but became more definite.
It lived again.
In the depths of what remained of its mind, only sheer instinct prevailed. It had fed long and well recently, and had returned to its crypt to digest its unholy meal. Some primeval instict told it that it was still being hunted. How it knew this it is impossible to know, but a sense of urgency had led it back to to the safety of its crypt to ride out the storm. The peace of eternal rest denied it, it could still occasionally have a brief taste of that rest only…
oracknows | July 28, 2006I have to apologize for last week's Dose of Woo. No, I'm not apologizing for the subject matter (the obsession that reigns supreme among some alties with "cleansing" one's colon to "purge toxins" and achieve the super-regularity of several bowel movements a day). Rather, I'm sorry I didn't point out just how disgusting one of the links I included was, because among all the glowing testimonials for how great colon cleansers felt after having supposedly rid themselves of all that nasty fecal matter caked on the walls of their colons and achieved the Nirvana of many bowel movements a day (or, as…
oracknows | July 27, 2006It's not your Friday Dose of Woo yet, but fear not. You'll get your weekly dose of woo in due course.
Kevin Trudeau is arguably the most prominent snakeoil salesmen of our time. I've leafed through his first book, Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About at the bookstore and recoiled at the conspiracy-mongering, lies, and self-promotion (a lot of discussions in the book urge you to pay for access to his website to get more information). As you may know, he's now released a followup book More Natural Cures Revealed.
Fortunately, Christopher Wanjek has read it so that I don't have to…
oracknows | July 27, 2006I hadn't intended to mention this case again for a while, but an article in Stats.org brought up a point that, although I had somewhat alluded to it, I hadn't really explicitly addressed. It has nothing to do with the judicial decision, the Cherrixes' successful appeal for a new trial and the stay ordered by the higher court, or any the legal issues involved with the case.
It has to do with the atrocious reporting of this case by the mainstream media. In other words, it has to do with how the case has been framed, which has been essentially a near total success for the Cherrixes and those who…
oracknows | July 26, 2006Unfortunately, I didn't have time to write much for today. Fortunately, this gives me the perfect opportunity to remedy a situation in which I've been remiss. As you know, Kathleen Seidel has been tirelessly exposing the dubious science promoted by Mark and David Geier, who advocate using Lupron to shut of sex hormone synthesis as a means of "treating" autism by "making chelation therapy more effective." She's posted much more since I last referenced her.
The advantage of my not having much time is that you can read the results of her investigations directly without my extensive commentary.…
oracknows | July 25, 2006From the AP:
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) -- A 16-year-old cancer patient was headed to court Tuesday with his lawyers to try to block a judge's order requiring him to report to a hospital the same day for treatment as doctors deem necessary.
A juvenile court judge on Monday denied a request by lawyers for Starchild Abraham Cherrix and his parents to stay his order pending an appeal in a higher court, said John Stepanovich, attorney for Jay and Rose Cherrix.
Lawyers also asked the Accomack County Circuit Court to take over the case and grant the stay, and a hearing was set for noon Tuesday in that court…
oracknows | July 24, 2006Not surprisingly, since the court decided that Abraham Cherrix, a Virginia teen who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease at age 15, underwent chemotherapy, relapsed, and then refused to undergo any further chemotherapy, opting instead for an "alternative medicine" treatment known as the Hoxsey treatment, to be administered at the Biomedical Center in Tijuana, the blogosphere has been abuzz with chatter about the decision. Not surprisingly, I find myself in the minority in approving of the decision, even if I do so reluctantly. Indeed, not only do I find myself in the minority, but I find…
oracknows | July 22, 2006I tell you, I take a night off from blogging, not even glancing at the blog or my e-mail, instead falling into a deep slumber at 10 PM after The Dog Whisperer on TV, thanks to a somewhat stressful week and a large meal plus a beer, and what happens?
Abraham' Cherrix's uncle comments on the old blog and the legal decision regarding whether Abraham has to undergo chemotherapy is issued, three days later than originally anticipated, that's what! In this case, the judge decided that Abraham must report on Tuesday to undergo conventional therapy. Fortunately, I realize (most of the time, anyway)…
oracknows | July 21, 2006Alright, I admit it.
I went a little overboard with last week's edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. This feature was intended to be a light-hearted look at whatever particular woo target that catches my fancy on a given week, as opposed to the more serious discussions of alternative medicine I like to do at other times. However, it's a fine line between believing in a bit of strange altie woo and possibly being a disturbed individual, and I fear that last week's targets (the guy who wanted to sell the secrets of Jesus on Ebay and Alex Chiu, who claims to have figured out how humans can be…
oracknows | July 19, 2006I thought this was a joke when a reader e-mailed me about it. I mean, it's just so over-the-top that I had a hard time believing that it was real.
It was (found via MacDailyNews):
The huge rise of autism in Britain is linked to old iPod batteries, mobile phones and other products of the electronic age, a leading scientist claimed this weekend.
Autistic children have been shown to have problems getting rid of toxic metals - and those metals are increasingly polluting the environment, says Dr Richard Lathe.
"Think of iPod batteries, computers, television sets and mobile phones - thousands of…
oracknows | July 14, 2006From The Daily Mail:
British holidaymakers are putting their lives at risk by relying on homeopathy to protect them against malaria, doctors have warned.
The medical experts condemned the practice of prescribing pills and potions made from tree bark, swamp water and rotting plants as 'outrageous quackery' and 'dangerous nonsense'.
Their warning follows an undercover investigation which found that alternative medicine clinics readily sell travellers homeopathic protection against malaria, despite clear Government advice that there is no evidence such treatments work.
It also comes after a…
oracknows | July 13, 2006Over the couple of days or so, a minor flurry of comments have hit the ol' blog. I hate to let commenters dictate the content of my blog, but it's strictly a coincidence that this happens to be a post I had been planning sometime this week anyway and it comes around the same time as the minor altie comment deluge hit the blog. Or maybe it's not such a coincidence, coming as it does in the wake of a court hearing relevant to the case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix. Recent commenters have castigated me, claiming that the Hoxsey treatment is not quackery; asserting that cancer is "not due to a…
oracknows | July 12, 2006Like most bloggers, I suspect, I like to know who's linking to me. Unfortunately, the majority of bloggers appear not to use TrackBacks, and even when they do for some reason the TrackBacks often don't register. Couple that with a level of comment spam that sometimes outnumbered my legitimate TrackBacks by at least 200:1, and you see that TrackBacks aren't a great way of knowing who's linking to you. Consequently, a couple of times a week, I do quick Technorati and Google Blog Searches on the URL of Respectful Insolence to see who happens to be linking to me.
That's how I found this brief…
oracknows | July 10, 2006I had tried to give the Dr. Mark Geier and his son David a rest for a while, as I suspected my readers may have been getting a little tired of my bashing them, no matter how deserved that bashing may have been. After all, they do shoddy science in the service of "proving" that mercury in vaccines causes autism. They concoct dubious IRBs riddled with conflicts of interest to "approve" their research. When the evidence that this is not the case becomes more and more compelling, they add a twist of a claim that many autistic children suffer from "precocious" puberty," which requires treatment…
oracknows | July 9, 2006He had been away a while. In fact, he had been away so long (since early May) that I was starting to wonder if he had given up blogging, which would have been a blow, given that he's one of my favorite skeptical bloggers.
Fortunately, my fears were premature, and he's back, with part 2 of his Seven Most Common Thinking Errors of Highly Amusing Quacks and Pseudoscientists.
oracknows | July 7, 2006When I originally conceived of doing a weekly feature entitled "Your Friday Dose of Woo," I did it almost on a whim. Now that I've reached the second week, I've realized that this is going to be harder than I thought. No, it's not that it's hard to find suitable targets. Quite the opposite, in fact. There's just too much woo out there, that it's really hard to choose a suitable subject. I had a hellacious time trying to pick one particular instance of woo that tickled my fancy enough to dedicate a blog post to it.
Of course, I did think about doing a followup to last week's Friday Dose of Woo…
oracknows | July 6, 2006It's that time again, time for the 38th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle.
Thirsty?
Well, LBBP over at Skeptic Rant offers parched skeptics a fine assortment of beverages including Satire Cider, Quack Quencher, Woo Brew, and Creationist Tonic, among others. It's just the cool, refreshing dose of critical thinking to quench that skeptical thirst that's been intensified by the rampant credulity of society in general and the blogosphere in particular.
Drink deep!
And come on back for the 39th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which will be hosted by Mike over at (appropriately enough) Mike's Weekly…
oracknows | July 6, 2006The mercury militia and MMR scaremongers aren't going to like this, not one bit.
What should greet my in box upon my arrival at work after a long Fourth of July weekend, but an alert of a new study of a large population of children in Canada that utterly failed to find an epidemiological link between thimerosal or MMR vaccination and autistic spectrum disorders. It's the latest in a continuous line of epidemiological studies and, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive epidemiological study to look at exposure to both MMR and thimerosal-containing vaccines. (The MMR vaccine, being a live…