Quackery
oracknows | November 6, 2012I sometimes think that Stanislaw Burzynski is a lot like the Bloody Mary of folklore, or perhaps Candyman of the famous horror movie—or perhaps like a number of other legends and horror stories—in that all it seems to take for him to show up in the blogosphere again is for me to recite his hame enough times. Yes, I know that it's a bit of confirmation bias on my part and whether or not some new Burzynski news happens to come to the fore again has little or nothing to do with my invocation of his name, but it is a rather amusing thought. Be that as it may, it was just late last week that I…
oracknows | November 4, 2012Chelation therapy, in my somewhat Insolent opinion, is pure quackery. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most common quackeries out there, used by a wide variety of practitioners for a wide variety of ailments blamed on "heavy metal toxicity." Chelation therapy involves using chemicals that can bind to the metal ions and allow them to be excreted by the kidneys is standard therapy for certain types of acute heavy metal poisoning, such as iron overload due to transfusion, aluminum overload due to hemodialysis, copper toxicity due to Wilson's disease, acute heavy metal toxicity, and a handful…
oracknows | October 31, 2012I'd like to publicly thank Dr. John Killen, Jr. I was looking for something to write about yesterday evening, and, just when I was beginning to despair that I might have to do another post on the lunacy that is antivaccine nonsense (even I get tired of taking on antivaccine idiocy, as regular readers know), he generously provided me with a perfect non-vaccine-related topic. Truly, to a skeptical blogger and supporter of science-based medicine like myself, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) blog is the gift that keeps on giving. I've written a lot of…
oracknows | October 30, 2012I guess this is in effect part two of yesterday's post. Regular daily readers (and you are a regular daily reader, aren't you?) will remember that yesterday I commented on the recent uptick in anti-Gardasil vaccine rhetoric coming from the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism and other sources, in the process deconstructing speculation masquerading as a case report allegedly indicting the quadrivalent HPV vaccine as a potential cause of premature ovarian failure in a 16 year old Australian girl. The article was so bad and so biased that I couldn't believe BMJ Case Reports published it in the…
oracknows | October 29, 2012Well, I'm home.
AFter spending a fun-filled three days in Nashville at CSICon communing with fellow skeptics and trying to awaken them to the problem of quackademic medicine, I made it back home. There were plenty of attendees who didn't make it back on time because flights to the East Coast were being cancelled left and right, courtesy of Hurricane Sandy. For example, Steve Novella and the entire SGU crew were forced to rent a van and drive 950 miles to Boston after their flight was cancelled sometime Saturday night. Difficulties aside, if there's one thing that almost always happens…
oracknows | October 29, 2012There's a saying in medicine that we frequently hear when a newer, more effective therapy supplants an older therapy or an existing therapy is shown not to be as efficacious as was once thought, and it has to do about how long it takes for the use of that therapy to decline. The saying basically says that the therapy won't die out until the current generation of established physicians retire and are replaced by the new generation coming up through medical schools. From my perspective, it's a bit of an exaggeration, because in the mere 13 years that I've been a real doctor (i.e., an attending…
oracknows | October 25, 2012Well, I'm here. That's right. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm at CSICon. As is the case when I'm at conferences, be they skeptical conferences or professional conferences, it's hard to predict the blogging time available. It could be a lot; it could be a little. Or it could be none. (Well, obviously it's not none, or you wouldn't be reading this.) In any case, there was lots of stuff going on, plus there was the second game of the World Series, which made me miss the live recording of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Oh, well. Steve understood. So I wasn't up for any heavy lifting or taking…
oracknows | October 22, 2012Just yesterday, I commented on a typical whine from the antivaccine crew at the crank blog Age of Autism in which Dan Olmsted became indignant over being reminded that science does not support his belief that vaccines cause autism, that they don't work, and that they are dangerous. Olmsted, clueless as ever about science, viewed being reminded that the science overwhelmingly doesn't support his belief as being akin to George W. Bush trying to convince the country that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to invade or to Richard Nixon urging people to stop investigating Watergate…
oracknows | October 21, 2012I like the word "manufactroversy."
It's a lovely made up word that combines the two words "manufactured controversy" and is, to boil it down, defined as the art of creating a controversy where none really exists. In the case of science, it's the concerted effort to make it seem as though there is a legitimate scientific controversy when in reality there is not. Indeed, one might say that the very purpose (or at least the main purpose) of this blog is to discuss manufactroversies. These include issues such as quackery, where promoters of pseudoscientific, unscientific, and prescientific…
oracknows | October 17, 2012As much as I write about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia, there is one particular area that is being increasingly invaded by such quackery. It's an area that you wouldn't necessarily expect, although anyone who's read The Men Who Stare at Goats might not be so shocked. Yes, I'm referring to the military, and, as I've documented time and time again, increasingly our men and women in uniform are being subjected to abject quackery. What they need and deserve is the very best science-based medicine that we as a nation have to offer. Instead, what more and more of…
oracknows | October 16, 2012I take back all those nice things I used to say about Nancy Snyderman.
There's no doubt that she "gets it" about vaccines and, for the most part, even though she does occasionally go overboard, and her understanding of the issues involved in the use of various vaccines is anything but nuanced. I used to think that she "got it" with respect to SBM, but then I saw her recent segment on "complementary" medicine on NBC News the other night. Here's part one, which aired Monday night:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
The very introduction made me groan,…
oracknows | October 15, 2012I hate to admit it, but I've known about this story since Friday night, when I received a couple of e-mails about it. I had meant to mention it here either over the weekend or on Monday, but I'm a bit like Dug the Dog in the movie Up. Think of it this way: Squirrel!
Yes, I'm easily distracted. I shouldn't have been, but I was this time.
I do, however, usually get back to business, and this is nasty business. In fact, it's a type of business of the sort that completely enrages me and the sort of thing I've blogged about many times in the past, namely the use of legal thuggery by promoters of…
oracknows | October 14, 2012In a week and a half, Harriet Hall, Kimball Atwood, and I will be joining Eugenie C. Scott at CSICon to do a session entitled Teaching Pseudoscience in Medical (and Other) Schools. As you might imagine, we will be discussing the infiltration of pseudoscience into medical academia and medical training, a phenomenon I frequently refer to as "quackademic medicine." It's a topic that has been much discussed on this blog; so I am quite confident that we are the people to tell our audience just how bad it is, why it's happening, and why you should be concerned about it. Also, from my perpective,…
oracknows | October 11, 2012And now for something completely different...
Well, not really. It's a little different, but regular readers will soon recognize it as a variation on the same old theme. One topic I've been writing about since the very beginning of this blog is the alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial, or, more specifically, the breast cancer cure testimonial. Indeed, one of the very first (perhaps the very first) of my "classic" Orac-length deconstructions was about this very topic. It's a topic that's come up again and again, even quite recently. To make a long story short, many breast cancer cure…
oracknows | October 9, 2012Another year, another Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
While most people who have either been touched by breast cancer or who have a professional interest in it, the significance of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is that it is a time, well, to increase awareness and to promote breast cancer research. There is another side to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, however, and it's not just the question of its excessive commercialization, which concerns some people. Rather, inevitably, just as the vaccine-autism quacks have come out of the woodwork for Autism Awareness Month each April, each October…
oracknows | October 7, 2012On Friday, I wrote about the sort of case that outrages me every bit as much as cases of cancer quackery that lead to the death of patients. I'm referring to the case of Amanda Sadowsky, a four month old infant who died after suffering traumatic brain injuries that appeared consistent with shaken baby syndrome (SBS). As I've pointed out before, what I've found to be one of the most disturbing antivaccine claims of all is the assertion that SBS is a "misdiagnosis for vaccine injury." As you might recall, SBS is the name originally given to a triad of findings consisting of subdural hemorrhage…
oracknows | October 3, 2012I'm having a hard time keeping myself from laughing uproariously. I'm talking gut-wrenching belly laughs, the kind that are so intense that you have trouble catching your breath between paroxysms of laughter, the kind that threaten to force the contents of your stomach to go the wrong way, up and out. What, you may ask, is so hilarious that it would make me laugh so hard that it hurts? Let's go back to last week, when I urged my readers to rally the troops to counter a couple of different antivaccine activities, one of which will occur later today. This is the appearance of the Dark Lord of…
oracknows | September 20, 2012It's feast or famine in the ol' blogging world, and right now it's such a feast that I can't decide what to blog about. For instance, there are at least two studies and a letter that I wouldn't mind blogging about just in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine alone. Then there's SaneVax and Dr. Sin Hang Lee, who has apparently released another study again claiming that the anti-HPV vaccine Gardasil is contaminated with—horror of horrors!—DNA. A quick perusal of it tells me that it's probably the same principle of PCR that I've discussed before, namely that it's quite…
oracknows | September 17, 2012Homeopathy is what I like to call The One Quackery To Rule Them All. Depending upon my mood, I'll use more or less of J.R.R. Tolkien's famous poem about the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings, but the point is usually made. Homeopathy is major quackery.
And it is, too. On the off chance that there's a newbie reading this who hasn't been a regular reader of this blog or other skeptical blogs and doesn't know what homeopathy is. (Regulars can skip this paragraph if they wish, but I wouldn't. It's entertaining.) Basically, homeopathy is a system of magical medicine thought up over 200 years ago…
oracknows | September 10, 2012One of the overarching issues, if not the overarching issue that makes so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)—or, as it's now more commonly called, "integrative medicine"—so problematic is prior plausibility. It's also one of the most difficult to explain to the lay public, because to someone not trained in science it can sound like not being open-minded. I like to joke about this whole concept by saying that it's good to be open-minded but not so open-minded that your brains fall out. In other words, the main difference between science-based medicine (SBM) and evidence-…