Quackery
oracknows | February 26, 2016About six months ago, I was highly amused to discover something called the Conspira-Sea Cruise, which I referred to at The Woo Boat. As I said at the time, file this one under the category: You can’t make stuff like this up. Certainly, I couldn't.
I've never been on a cruise. Quite frankly, the very concept of a cruise doesn't much appeal to me, at least not an ocean cruise. My wife and I have considered doing a Viking River Cruise, because a river cruise where you get to stop at multiple historic European cities and watch the countryside roll by while on the ship sounds far more appealing to…
oracknows | February 25, 2016When last I visited this topic, I was highly tempted to start out out by making a simple observation, namely by quoting John Wooden's famous adage, "The true test of a man's character is what he does when no one is watching." Since I didn't use it for the two posts I did on this particular topic, Sh*t naturopaths say and Sh*t naturopaths say, part 2, I just did it for this post. It's the perfect quote for this topic.
What I'm referring to is a private discussion forum for naturopaths known as Naturopathic Chat, or NatChat for short, and how a leak from the group had revealed the sort of pure…
oracknows | February 24, 2016I've written several times over the years about the overblown claims of harm attributed, largely—but not exclusively—by cranks, to cell phone radiation. It's been claimed that radiation from cell phones can cause brain tumors (there's no convincing evidence that this is true), breast cancer (the evidence for these claims is so incredibly flimsy—and featured by Dr. Oz, to boot!—that this is not a credible claim), and a wide variety of other health issues. Indeed, if you believe the cranks, the mobile phone companies are the equivalent of tobacco companies denying that their products cause…
oracknows | February 23, 2016I didn't think I'd be writing about Stanislaw Burzynski again so soon, but to my surprise a very good article in Newsweek describing cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski popped up in my Google Alerts yesterday. I hadn't expected much in the way of news coverage about Burzynski for several months, given that the second half of Burzynski's trial before the Texas Medical Board had been delayed by his having suffered a heart attack and isn't expected to begin again for several months. Entitled Cancer "visionary" Stanislaw Burzynski stands trial for unprecedented medical malfeasance and by Tamar…
oracknows | February 19, 2016One of the most frequent claims of supporters of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), which goes by the Orwellian name "integrative medicine," is that it represents "integrating" alternative medicine with science-based medicine to produce the "best of both worlds." Of course, when I think of the best of both worlds, I usually think of The Best of Both Worlds, which might well be appropriate, except that, unlike the case when the Borg assimilate a species, when science-based medicine is forced to assimilate quackery, the quackery changes it, making it weaker, not stronger…
oracknows | February 17, 2016My state is screwed up, and the epicenter of the fallout from the dysfunctional mess that is the Michigan state government is the city of Flint. As you probably recall, around the holidays a story that had previously been mainly a Michigan story broke nationally in a big way. It is the story of how a combination of the imposition of an emergency manager on the city, epic incompetence at the level of the state and local government, and outright denial of a problem for several months by the veyr state agency (the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality) charged with making sure that things…
oracknows | February 12, 2016Ever since the beginning of this blog, there's one topic I've explored many, many times, mainly because of its direct relationship to my profession as a cancer surgeon. That topic is, of course, the question of why people fall for alternative medicine cancer "cures." It started with one of my very earliest posts and continued right up to deconstructing Presidential candidate Ben Carson's very own alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial last fall. It continues again now.
Regular readers, particularly long time readers, have already come to recognize common themes in these alternative…
oracknows | February 10, 2016Last week, I wrote about how conspiracy theories have been flowing fast and furious about the Zika virus and microcephaly. Even if you didn't see that post (perhaps instead having seen this one), you've probably seen the news reports describing how last fall the observation of a large number of cases of microcephaly, characterized by an abnormally small head and delayed brain development, in Brazil led researchers investigating the problem to suspect a link to a virus. That virus, the Zika virus, as you recall, is a mosquito-borne flavivirus related to dengue virus and transmitted primarily…
oracknows | February 9, 2016If there's one thing that's frustrating about the U.S. justice system, it's just how slow the wheels of justice grind. For example, it's hard to believe that it was over two years ago that "pH Miracle" quack Robert O. Young was arrested for fraud, grand theft, and practicing medicine without a license, producing one of my favorite images ever on this blog, that of Young in a blue prison jump suit. The only way it could have been better would have been if it had been an orange jumpsuit, but unfortunately a contact in San Diego tells me that San Diego County doesn't use orange jumpsuits for its…
oracknows | February 8, 2016Katie May was a model, and by all accounts a very successful one, having appeared in Playboy, Sports Illustrated, and other magazines and websites. Self-proclaimed the "Queen of Snapchat," she also had nearly two million Instagram followers and was a major social media force, having recently parlayed her modeling and social media career into becoming an entrepreneur. She also died unexpectedly on Thursday night at the too-young age of 34, leaving behind a seven-year-old daughter. What makes May's tragic death an appropriate topic for this blog is not so much her young age but rather the…
oracknows | February 4, 2016It's an oft-stated cliche that our children our our future. That's the reason stories involving dire threats to children are considered so terrifying. It's why, for instance, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End resonated so creepily. After all, as part of the end of civilization, a frightening change came over the children, who became far superior in abilities and mental power to their parents. Another example includes Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, whose plot involves the human race being plagued by a new disease called "Herod's Flu," which causes pregnant women to spontaneously abort their…
oracknows | February 4, 2016Well, it's finally done.
The grants that have been taking up so much of my time are finally with the grants office and, hopefully, won't have too many errors flagged as they go through the validation process. So it's time to get back into that blogging thing again, even though I'm admittedly tired. So I'll start out slow. No Orac-ian epics today, just another rather satisfying bit of news mirroring a previous post that I did last week about how making it more difficult to obtain personal belief exemptions to school vaccine requirements works. In states where PBEs are difficult to obtain or…
oracknows | February 3, 2016I know I must be getting older because of Friday nights. I also know that I'm getting older because (1) there was no new post yesterday and (2) even today this post will look familiar to a significant number of our readership. Mea culpa, but trying to put the finishing touches on two R01 grants I've been working on takes a toll. Who knew? Things should get back to normal tomorrow or Friday at the latest. Be that as it may, let's get back to Fridays. After a long, hard week (and, during grant season, in anticipation of a long, hard weekend of more of the aforementioned grant writing), it's not…
oracknows | January 31, 2016Politicians and activists know that one of the most effective ways to discredit critics is to try to portray them as (1) being in the pay of someone else, such as a big corporation, or (2) part of an "organized" effort to criticize them, or (3) preferably both. That's why antivaccine cranks are so fast to deploy the "pharma shill gambit" and cranks like Sharyl Attkisson like to accuse their critics of "astroturfing." Of course, astroturfing, which is the practice of trying to make a public relations campaign promoting a message appear to originate organically from the grassroots rather than…
oracknows | January 27, 2016It's been nearly three weeks since I wrote about how an imperative to save money at all costs combined with gross incompetence to poison Flint's children with lead. In (very) brief, the city of Flint decided to switch from buying water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to a new water source. Unfortunately, the pipeline from that water authority, which was going to draw water from Lake Huron, wasn't scheduled to be completed until 2016. When DWSD learned that Flint was going to switch water sources, it gave a year's notice that it was going to void its long term contract…
oracknows | January 25, 2016I know I really shouldn't peruse NaturalNews.com too often. It's bad for my blood pressure, and, like many old farts on the wrong side of 50, I do have a touch of the ol' hypertension. Reading Mike Adams' blather risks raising that blood pressure either through causing me to laugh uproariously at the sheer idiocy of what he writes or by making me angry at just how despicable he can be at times. Still, I looked, and I saw something I almost wish I hadn't seen. However, that something that I saw illustrates a point about the dark side of open access journals; so I thought it was worth…
oracknows | January 20, 2016I like to say that homeopathy is The One Quackery To Rule Them All (although of late I've debated whether homeopathy or reiki is the most properly referred to as that). It's a strange beast, homeopathy. Its two main "Laws" are so clearly pseudoscience that you'd think that no one could ever fall for something that dumb, but, well over 200 years after Samuel Hahnemann pulled those two Laws out of his nether regions, not only is homeopathy still popular in large swaths of the developed world, but there are actual physicians who use it.
Just consider homeopathy's laws. The first is the Law of…
oracknows | January 20, 2016One of the cool things about being a longtime blogger in the skeptical world with a reasonably high profile is that I've met, either virtually or in person at various skeptic conferences, a wide variety of people from all over the world. One place in particular that has a vibrant skeptic movement is, of course, Australia, and I've been happy to meet skeptics such as Rachael Dunlop, Jo Benhamu, Richard Saunders, Eren Segev, and several others. I know that, whenever I finally manage to make that trip to Australia that I've been meaning to make for years, there will be people I know to meet up…
oracknows | January 18, 2016I've been a big fan of David Bowie ever since high school. True, I didn't appreciate his less mainstream stuff as intensely as I do now until I had been in college a couple of years, but it's not an inaccurate to characterize the effect of David Bowie's art on my life as significant. Basically, I own pretty much everything he ever committed to CD or vinyl and have seen him in concert every time he's toured, starting with his Serious Moonlight Tour in 1983 and ending with his appearance at Madison Square Garden during his Reality Tour in December 2003. I saw him with Trent Reznor in 1995, and…
oracknows | January 17, 2016One of the recurring topics I write about is, of course, cancer quackery. It goes right back to the very beginning of this blog, to my very earliest posts more than 11 years ago. Over the years I've covered more cases than I can remember of patients relying on quackery instead of real medicine. In particular, tales of children with highly curable cancers being treated with quackery bother me most of all. Many have been the examples throughout the years: Abraham Cherrix, Katie Wernecke, Chad Jessop, Daniel Hauser, Sarah Hershberger, and teens like Cassandra Callender, who wanted to use…