Quackery
oracknows | June 8, 2012
Sometimes I feel like Dug, the talking dog in the movie Up, in that when it comes to blogging I'm often easily distracted. The reason I say this is because there's been a "viral" (if you can call it that) video floating around the antivaccine quackery blogosphere that antivaccinationists are passing around as though it's slam-dunk evidence that vaccines aren't safe. It's called the Chalkboard Campaign:
Basically, it's one long series of chalkboard images touting pseudoscience and antivaccine misinformation over and over again, all over a sappy pop music soundtrack, using the tag line from…
oracknows | June 7, 2012I've lost track of how many times over the last 7 years I've mentioned that naturopathy is not science-based. The evidence is overwhelming. All you have to do is to took at the wide variety of quackery that fits comfortably into naturopathic practice to realize that most of naturopathy is quackery. Traditional Chinese medicine? Check. Various "energy healing"? Check. "Detoxification" woo? Check. Homeopathy?
Check.
I brought up this point last year when I pointed out that you can't have naturopathy without homeopathy. I based this assessment on the fact that not only his homeopathy a required…
oracknows | June 5, 2012Remember Vox Day?
Newer converts to the glory that is Orac (or at least to the ego that is Orac) might not know who Vox is because it's been a while since I've discussed his antiscience attitudes. By and large, this is probably a good thing, given that Vox denies evolution, has been antivaccine from way back, and apparently thinks nothing of suggesting that the U.S. emulate Hitler's methods of ejecting Jews from Germany to take care of our illegal immigrant problem. Truly, Vox is an example of crank magnetism at work. Particularly amusing is the way that he trumpets his membership in Mensa…
oracknows | June 4, 2012Let me start right here by repeating yet again my oft-repeated assessment of reiki. Reiki is clearly nothing more than faith healing that substitutes Eastern mysticism for Christianity. Think of it this way. In faith healing, the faith healer claims to channel the healing power of God into the person being healed. In reiki, the reiki master claims to be able to channel "life energy" from what they refer to as the "universal source." Big difference, right?
Wrong. It's the same thing.
Let me also point out that, as much as I detest quackery, I'm particularly not a big fan of subjecting innocent…
oracknows | June 3, 2012Homeopaths are funny.
Really, that's the best description of them that I can think of right now. And I don't mean "funny ha-ha," either. An example of this popped up over the weekend in an attack on Dr. Joe Schwarcz of McGill University's Office for Science and Society. "Dr. Joe," as he likes to be called, is a chemist and a skeptic, with his own radio show on Montreal's CJAD every Sunday afternoon (which, by the way, I've appeared on a couple of times over the last three or four years). He's been deconstructing pseudoscience and alternative medicine claims for a lot longer than I have; so he…
oracknows | May 30, 2012Remember Dr. Jay?
Regular readers know about whom I speak. I'm talking about Dr. Jay Gordon, pediatrician to the stars' children. Dr. Jay has been a fixture on this blog on and off for seven years, first having popped in as a commenter way back on Respectful Insolence, Mark 1, when I first noted him promoting antivaccine nonsense claiming against all science that vaccines cause austism on—where else?—that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post. Since then, Dr. Jay has assiduously denied that he is antivaccine, all the while spewing antivaccine canards hither, thither, and yon…
oracknows | May 28, 2012I always thought that the University of Toronto was a great school, but lately I've been starting to have my doubts.
My doubts began three years ago, when I noticed that Autism One Canada, which is basically the Canadian version of the yearly antivaccine biomedical quackfest held every Memorial Day week in the Chicago area, was being held at the University of Toronto. As I said at the time, "Say it ain't so!" As it turns out, it wasn't so, at least not exactly, in that the University of Toronto wasn't sponsoring the quackfest. Rather, Autism One had rented a hall at the University of Toronto…
oracknows | May 27, 2012I was thinking of taking Memorial Day off. There are several reasons. First, it's a holiday. Second, the blog still isn't functioning quite up to snuff after the transition to WordPress. In particular, we still have a major spam infestation that is unlikely to improve before Tuesday. It also doesn't help that I have a whole bunch of grant writing to do.
Then I saw this. I became aware of the post through a TrackBack, and that TrackBack came from the website of a rock group—yes a rock group, and a bad one, at that—made up of antivaccine loons. Those antivaccine loons call themselves The…
oracknows | May 25, 2012It's that time of year again.
What am I talking about? Regular readers know. They know that sometime around the Memorial Day weekend every year, usually beginning a couple of days before the extended weekend and into the weekend itself, there lands in the Chicago area a quackfest of such unrelenting quackitude that it has to be seen to be believed. Basically, it's the antivaccine and autism "biomed" movement Woodstock, except that it happens every year. Any and every quack and die-hard antivaccinationist who still believes believes against all evidence that vaccines cause autism is usually…
oracknows | May 24, 2012Well, screwed up transition to WordPress or not, I think it's time to get back to the business of doing what Orac does best: Laying down the Insolence, Respectful and Not-So-Respectful. While the remaining bugs are being ironed out, I'll work on trying to get the blog's appearance back to the way I like it as I harass the Seed/NatGeo overlords to fix things up for the benefit of you, my readers. (Well, it's also to my benefit, too. Using WordPress the way it's configured now is a real PITA, if you know what I mean.) I thought about wandering over to that despicable den of antivaccine iniquity…
oracknows | May 20, 2012Acupuncture has been a frequent topic on this blog because, of all the "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) modalities out there, it's arguably the one that most people accept as potentially having some validity. The rationale behind acupuncture is, as we have explained many times before, little different than the rationale behind any "energy healing" method (like reiki, for example) in that it claims to redirect the flow of "life energy" (the ever-invoked qi). The only difference is that acupuncturists claim to bring this therapeutic qi rearrangement about by sticking thin needles…
oracknows | May 18, 2012I'm sometimes asked why I do this. Why, people ask me, do I spend so much time generating post after post after post day after day after day? Obviously, one reason is that it interests me. Another reason is the passion that drives me to support science and science-based medicine and to detest the damage the pseudoscience, particularly pseudoscience in medicine, can do. There is, however, at least one more reason.
I'm referring, of course, to the adoration of my "fans."
Yes, the more I'm attacked, the more I know I've been effective against the forces of irrationality and pseudoscience. When…
oracknows | May 17, 2012About a week ago, I took note of what appears to be a new offshoot of the antivaccine movement known as the Thinking Moms' Revolution (TMR). At the time, I pointed out the toxic combination of hubris mixed with ignorance that resulted in a risible "declaration of independence" from "medical tyranny." In reality, it was one long antivaccine rant full of long refuted myths and pseudoscience combined with a demand for an unethical study of the current vaccine schedule verus placebo. In brief, to anyone with half a brain, it would have been embarrassing. Apparently the woman who wrote it lacks…
oracknows | May 16, 2012I'm sometimes criticized for referring to various people who are "anti-science" as, well, "anti-science." People, for whatever reason, have a hard time believing that anyone is anti-science; so when I point out how much, for example, antivaccinationists, alternative medicine believers, or creationists are anti-science, they have a had time believing it. This is particularly true because, just as antivaccinationists loudly protest that they are not "antivaccine," those who are anti-science equally loudly protest that they are not "anti-science." Such protestations are almost inevitably…
oracknows | May 14, 2012I acquiesce.
I know that I'm not going to have a lot of control over my selection of blogging material for a given day when I see more than one or two requests for an analysis of an article. So it was, when links like these were showing up in my e-mail:
Acupuncture May Help Ease Symptoms of COPD
Acupuncture May Be Worth a Shot for COPD: Small Study Shows Acupuncture May Help People With COPD Breathe Easier
These two news stories refer to a study from Japan by Suzuki et al published online yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine entitled A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial of…
oracknows | May 13, 2012Last week, I pointed out that, when referring to a therapy and considering whether it should be tested in clinical trials, plausibility does not mean knowing the mechanism. Today, I intend to elaborate a bit on that. As my jumping-off point, I couldn't ask for anything better (if you can call it that) than an article by homeopaths published last week online in Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy entitled Plausibility and evidence: the case of homeopathy. You'll get an idea of what it is that affected Orac like the proverbial matador waving his cape in front of a bull by reading this brief…
oracknows | May 11, 2012It's been a while since I've done a bit of Your Friday Dose of Woo, and I actually kind of miss it. It's not that there hasn't been anything that hasn't been worthy of this "honor" for a while. On the other hand, there hasn't been anything in a while that combines just the right proportions of pure woo, utter ridiculousness, and pure pseudoscience to provide the perfect "inspiration" to start me on a roll. Oh, it's out there, but for some reason I've let myself become bogged down by topics that are just too serious. It's time to lighten up, at least for a little while.
So it was when I came…
oracknows | May 10, 2012One of my newer blogging interests is the "alternative" cancer doctor named Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Although I had heard of him years ago, mainly in the context of his desperate patients tapping into the generosity of kind-hearted strangers to pay for his "antineoplaston" therapy, I hadn't really written much about him until very recently. About six months ago, Burzynski came to my attention because of his clinic's use of an Internet legal thug named Marc Stephens, who threatened skeptical bloggers with legal action after they had criticized the Burzynski Clinic and then later disavowed him…
oracknows | May 8, 2012I tend to get lost in complexity from time to time.
I know, big surprise to my regular readers, but I suppose it's a good thing that at least I know that this is a weakness of mine. Indeed, it must be part and parcel of my seeming tendency to produce epic posts of ridiculous length that sometimes surpass 5,000 words, although, in all fairness, my average post length is probably less than 2,000 words, which is still too long for many people but not beyond the pale. Of course, part of the reason for this is that I like to leave no stone unturned. In particular, I tend to like to make my…
oracknows | May 6, 2012One of the most inaptly named groups I've ever seen is called Thinking Moms' Revolution (henceforth abbreviated as TMR). Given the reality of what TMR really is, the word "thinking" applied to TMR is, as they say, so wrong it's not even wrong. As for a "revolution," what TMR really represents is nothing revolutionary at all, unless you consider antivaccinationism, run-of-the-mill antiscience paranoia, and big pharma conspiracy theories to be "revolutionary." I don't know about you, but I do not. I've followed such activities for well over a decade now, and in light of that experience,…