Quackery
oracknows | July 5, 2006PZ may have wasted his life preparing students for medical school, and Skeptico may have wished that he had thought of this first, but what about me, a real physician, who, if EoR is correct, has utterly wasted his life actually going to medical school?
Read this excerpt from EoR's Words to a Potential Medical Student and see what I mean:
Before you enroll for that medical course, consider carefully whether it's the best path for your life. Perhaps complementary medicine is actually a better way to go, with many clear advantages...
The course is shorter. Never mind years of study and…
oracknows | July 2, 2006The guys over at Medgaget are guys after my own heart. After commenting on a dubious-sounding device called the emWave Personal Stress Reliever, which, as its makers claim, is Scientifically Validated:
Stress creates incoherence in our heart rhythms. However, when we are in a state of high heart rhythm coherence the nervous system, heart, hormonal and immune systems are working efficiently and we feel good emotionally. emWave Personal Stress Reliever helps you reduce your emotional stress by displaying your level of heart rhythm coherence in real time. But emWave does more than just display…
oracknows | July 1, 2006This just cracked me up this morning:
NEW YORK - Kevin Trudeau, the million-selling author, infomercial star and convicted felon, swears that his new health guide, "More Natural 'Cures' Revealed," is 100 percent true.
Make that 100 percent true "in essence."`
"My point is I don't want to be caught in what is true, what isn't true, what is opinion, what is an idea," Trudeau, whose self-published "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About," thrived despite his criminal past and other legal run-ins, said.
"More Natural Cures," released in May and also self-published, is a sequel to "…
oracknows | June 30, 2006While thinking about ways to make the blog better, I wondered if I should emulate some of my colleagues, many of whom have regular features every week, often on Friday. And, since I usually get a little less serious on Fridays anyway (and, because traffic seems to fall off 50% or more anyway regardless of what I post, on the weekends, too), it seemed like a good idea. But I couldn't think of something that ties together the common themes of this blog, yet maintains a suitably Friday-blogging light-hearted feel to it. And then I came across this article:
L. R. Milgrom (2006). Towards a New…
oracknows | June 28, 2006Damn you, Kathleen.
Every time I think that I can give the whole mercury/autism thing a rest for a while and move on to less infuriating pastures, you keep finding things that keep dragging me back to the pit of pseudoscience inhabited by Dr. Mark Geier and his son David. The first time around, Kathleen found the Geiers misrepresenting David Geier's credentials on published journal articles to make it appear that David Geier had done the work reported in the articles at George Washington University when in fact he had not. I found David Geier's appropriation of the name of George Washington…
oracknows | June 26, 2006I've written several times about two young victims of what is normally a highly treatable cancer (Hodgkin's lymphoma) and how, with their parents' support, they have jeopardized their lives by choosing alternative therapies. The first, Katie Wernecke, was initially taken from her family by the State of Texas, but her parents ultimately won a court battle and took her out of the state for altie treatment with vitamin C infusions. Presently, she is somewhere out of state receiving some unknown treatment that, according to her father, he cannot disclose or the doctors will no longer treat her.…
oracknows | June 22, 2006Holy crap.
Just when I thought I had heard or seen it all, something comes up that proves me wrong. This time, the "something" comes to my attention via Corpus Callosum. It's a story about people abusing a drug. Only it's not just any drug, but a drug commonly used to treat breast cancer (which, given that a large part of my practice is the treatment of breast cancer patients, is why this item caught my attention).
They're abusing tamoxifen.
A survey of male and female gym attendees found not only growing rates of steroid abuse but also greater misuse of prescription drugs.
Prescription drugs…
oracknows | June 21, 2006It's been a very interesting week for those of us who try to keep an eye on antivaccination warriors who scare mothers with claims based on either no science or bad science of dire consequences that will come from vaccinating their children.
A very interesting week indeed, kind of like that old curse, "May you live in interesting times."
Last week, eight years after his study that set off scare whose repercussions continue even now, Andrew Wakefield was finally called to account for professional misconduct for unreported conflicts of interest and highly unethical and unprofessional behavior.…
oracknows | June 20, 2006Australian skeptic Peter Bowditch was challenged by a homeopath to take some homeopathic 200C belladonna tablets. Ever the intrepid skeptic and critical thinker, Peter has now answered the challenge in front of 100 people and reported his experience, beginning with a description of what he should have experienced:
A Modern Herbal by Mrs Maud Grieve, where it says that I should have been experiencing ""Strange indescribable feelings with giddiness, yawning, staggering or falling on attempting to walk; dryness of mouth and throat, sense as of suffocation, swallowing difficult, voice husky; face…
oracknows | June 19, 2006Time flies when you're having fun.
Hard as it is to believe, it's been a year since RFK, Jr. first posted his ridiculous conspiracy-mongering piece on Salon.com. Ever since moving to ScienceBlogs back in February, I had planned on reposting this article on the anniversary of its original appearance. Unfortunately, for some reason I misremembered the date as being later last June than it really was, leading me to forget completely about reposting on the day it should have been reposted, namely last Saturday. Oh, well, better late than never. If you're curious about how I plunged head first…
oracknows | June 19, 2006Almost two months ago, I posted a rather light-hearted skeptical takedown of a guy by the name of Don Lemmon, who billed himself on his website as The #1 Nutritionist Online. The main gimmicks of the post were twofold. First, I poked fun at his selling of dessicated animal glands, in which he harkened back to a 16th century alchemist and physician named Paracelsus to justify what appeared to me to be a variant of the quackery known as live cell therapy. The second part of my schtick was to feign envy at the success that he appeared to be having over it all, marrying a retired porn star,…
oracknows | June 16, 2006In Petaluma, California (the Bay area), as reported by ABC 7:
June 14 - KGO - More former clients of a North Bay chiropractor are coming forward, echoing what we reported a month-and-a-half ago -- that Daniel Marsh is making money off some bizarre treatments.
State investigators are looking into Dr. Marsh, his treatments and his billing practices. They're checking out information uncovered by the I-Team. And now we've received new complaints about the Petaluma chiropractor.
Marianne Whitfield went to Petaluma chiropractor Daniel Marsh for her severe heartburn, or acid reflux. He had an…
oracknows | June 12, 2006Well, it didn't take The Spoof long to comment on the Andrew Wakefield affair. Choice bits:
While on holiday in the US in 1997 he was introduced to a creationist nutter called Professor Hugh Fudenberg who claimed to cure autistic children by giving them samples of his own bone marrow.
And, my favorite:
Wakefield was recruited for a sum not less than the publicly reported thrity peices of silver and began being tutored in Fudenberg's "transfer factor technology" - the secret key to mastering miracle cures for childhood autism syndrome.
This theory was based on a curious supposition that…
oracknows | June 12, 2006When it rains it pours, eh?
While I happen to be on the topic of vaccines and autism again today, here's a surprising story:
Andrew Wakefield, the doctor behind the scare over a potential link between the MMR jab and autism in children, is to face four charges relating to unprofessional conduct at the General Medical Council, it is reported today.
Mr Wakefield, a surgeon who became a gut specialist, could be struck off the medical register and debarred from practising in the UK if the GMC finds him guilty of serious professional misconduct.
Following the publication of a research paper in the…
oracknows | June 12, 2006Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it's been a while since I've written a substantive post on the fear mongering and bad science that are used by activists to support the claim that mercury in the thimerosal used as preservatives in vaccines is the cause of an "autism epidemic." The closest I've come is using Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s credulous reporting and conspiracy-mongering, in which he uncritically parroted the claims of the worst of the mercury militia and arguing that his recent article in Rolling Stone uses the same sort of dubious and fallacious techniques, showing…
oracknows | June 11, 2006A couple of days ago, I wrote about a megafestival of altie woo taking place in my favorite city. It just occurred to me right now: If I were in Chicago right at this very minute, I could be in Hulda Clark's workshop (which is starting right now) learning how to cure all cancers and cure all diseases by zapping people's parasites and telling them to get their amalgam fillings and any teeth with root canals removed.
I'm missing a chance right now to learn a new skill that would let me become the ultimate doctor! Why on earth am I still here on the East Coast?
Well, I guess there's always…
oracknows | June 9, 2006It's times like this that I really wish I were back in Chicago. Actually, it's times like any time that I wish I were back in Chicago, but this in particular brings out that feeling:
The Health Freedom Expo is invading Chicago beginning today.
Of course, whenever you hear someone advocating "health freedom," it's a pretty good bet that it's an altie advocating quackery. After all, lacking data to support the efficacy of their favored treatments, alties often resort to the argument that attempts to suppress them are an attack on "health freedom." Of course, much of the time, what is being…
oracknows | June 7, 2006I really have to turn off my Google Alerts for this topic. I'm going to pull out my hair if I don't.
As you may recall, I've been posting about two young victims of the siren call of quackery who will most likely pay with their lives for their trust in quacks. The first, Katie Wernecke, rejected conventional medicine in Texas several months ago and is now at an undisclosed location receiving "secret" treatments, her father claiming that he can't reveal what treatment she is receiving or the doctors will stop treating her. The second, Abraham Cherrix, has gotten permission to leave Virginia to…
oracknows | June 4, 2006Last week, I wrote about two teens (Katie Wernecke and Abraham Cherrix) who, sadly, had been duped by the siren call of quackery and were, with the acquiescence of their parents, on the road to extinction. It figures that more information would become available over the weekend (after I had written my article) about both of them, first Abraham and now Katie:
Katie Wernecke, the cancer-afflicted girl at the center of a bitter state custody battle last year, is receiving secret treatment from an alternative practitioner at an undisclosed location.
"On a condition of receiving treatment, there…
oracknows | June 3, 2006Compared to the usual topics discussed during the week, I normally like to try to keep the weekend fare on the ol' blog relatively light and fluffy (mainly because traffic usually falls around 50% and I like to post my serious material on skepticism and science on days when I tend to have the most readers), but to me this can't wait until Monday. As you may recall, a couple of days ago, I wrote about Abraham Starchild Cherrix, a 15-year old who, with his father, has rejected conventional therapy for his Hodgkin's Lymphoma. It now looks as though he will get to go to Mexico:
ACCOMAC, Va. (AP…