Quackery
oracknows | April 1, 2011
Ah, April Fools' Day!
I had thought of trying to do a typical April Fools' Day post, you know, something like trying to write something but the last time I tried to do that it fell really flat, so flat that I'm not even going to link to it. It's better not to remind my readers of my jokes that fell completely flat. Better to move on to a more appropriate April Fools' Day topic, a topic like the James Randi Educational Foundation's annual Pigasus Awards. The basic idea is to give recognition where recognition is due for the five worst promoters of nonsense from the previous year.
For 2011…
oracknows | March 28, 2011Grant time again! Since today--yes, today!--is the deadline for a rather big grant I'm writing (not quite R01 level, but a respectable three year project if I can get it), I was up until the wee hours of the morning trying to put this sucker to bed. Being the ever-benevolent blogger, though, far be it from me to deny you some Insolence. It'll just have to be recycled Insolence. Not just recycled Insolence, either. Old recycled Insolence, four years old, to be precise! Unbelievable! In fact, it's so old that the links don't even work anymore; so you'll have to take my word for it that I quoted…
oracknows | March 23, 2011I don't like quackery.
I know, I know. Big surprise, right? After all, I've only spent the last six years laying down a nearly daily dose of Insolence, Respectful and not-so-Respectful, on the anti-vaccine movement, alternative medicine practitioners, quacks, and pseudoscientists of many different stripes. Seeing my fellow human beings fall for unproven or even dangerous remedies leads me to want to try to convince them to pull back and stick with science-based medical therapies. When quackery causes harm, I become even more motivated. Yet there is an area of quackery that I rarely write…
oracknows | March 22, 2011For years now, one of the major themes of this blog, between laying the cluestick on anti-vaccine loons and examining quackery and pseudoscience in all its forms, has been to examine the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia. The reason, as you might expect, is because, as an academic surgeon myself who runs his own laboratory, seeing pseudoscience and religious quackery such as reiki, therapeutic touch, naturopathy, and even homeopathy and anthroposophic medicine, has in the past usually disturbed me far more than seeing this sort of nonsense in private practice settings…
oracknows | March 21, 2011I graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in the late 1980s. Back then, U. of M. was really hardcore about science back then, so much so that it was viewed as seriously old-school. No new (at the time) organ system approach for us! During the first two years, ever four weeks, like clockwork, we'd have what was called a concurrent examination, which basically meant that we were tested (with multiple choice tests, of course!) on every subject on the same morning. At the time I was there, the medical curriculum for the first two years had been fairly constant for quite some time…
oracknows | March 20, 2011Well, well, well, well.
Last week, I wrote one of my usual patented bits of insolence directed at "America's doctor," Dr. Mehmet Oz. What prompted my irritation was a recent episode in which Dr. Oz featured psychic scammer John Edward, the self-proclaimed "psychic" who claims to be able to speak with the dead. In actuality, Edward is nothing more than a mediocre cold reader, but he's parlayed his skills into a lucrative career as host of his own TV show (Crossing Over With John Edward, which ran for several years back in the 1990s and early 2000s), author, and touring psychic medium. His…
oracknows | March 18, 2011
Many are the times when I've pointed out that many "complementary and alternative medicine" CAM or "integrative medicine" (IM) modalities are very much more based on religion or mystical ideas akin to religion than on anything resembling science. I realize that my saying this is nothing new, but every so often I see something that reminds me of this concept to the point that, self-important logorrheic blogger that I am, I can't resist commenting, particularly when I'm amused by the story. This particular story is amusing, to me at least.
You see, it's about what happens when one religion…
oracknows | March 17, 2011You know, I really know the feeling described in this song:
I really do. How about you?
oracknows | March 17, 2011People believe a lot of wacky things. Some of these things are merely amusingly wacky, while others are dangerously wacky. Among the most dangerously wacky of things that a large number of people believe in is the idea that germ theory is invalid. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that among the most dangerously wacky of nonsense is germ theory denialism; i.e., the denial that germs are the cause of disease. Few theories in medicine or science are supported as strongly by such a huge amount of evidence from multiple disciplines that converge on the idea that microorganisms cause disease,…
oracknows | March 10, 2011Not too long ago, I posted a rather amusing little video called Immunize! One line in the song that amused me went something like this:
Don't give Chuck Norris shots!
That'd be dim.
Chuck need vaccines? Naw
Vaccines need him?
Actually, not too surprisingly, it turns out that the word "dim" should be applied to Chuck Norris, particularly when it comes to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), also known as "integrative medicine" (IM), or, as I call it, "integrating" quackery with real medicine. Of course, as fellow Sb bloggers have demonstrated, Chuck's well-toned biceps aren't the…
oracknows | March 9, 2011Via Stupid Evil Bastard, here's a great cartoon that points out the red flags that indicate most of the major red flags of quackery (click to embiggen and see the whole cartoon):
I have to admit. The main ones are all there.
oracknows | March 8, 2011Confusing correlation with causation. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. These are two of the most common errors human beings make. Indeed, they're natural errors that our brains appear hard-wired to make, and, without scientific training, it's virtually impossible to avoid making the conclusion that, because two occurrences correlate with each other they must be related or because and event precedes the onset of a condition (like autism), then that something must have caused that condition. One can see how, living in the wilderness, seeing patterns and causes quickly was likely to be beneficial more…
oracknows | March 7, 2011Over the years, I've pointed out just how horrible British libel laws are. If there is a set of laws more designed to be used and abused by the wealthy to silence criticism, it's British libel laws. Indeed, I was pointing out the travesty that is British libel law in the context of David Irving's use of it to try to silence Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt years before Simon Singh became a cause celebre in the skeptical community after the British Chiropractic Association sued him on the flimsiest of grounds. Fortunately, the BCA lost, but only after coming very close to winning and costing…
oracknows | March 4, 2011Due to my activities at the Society of Surgical Oncology meeting in San Antonio, somehow I didn't manage to crank out a bit of that Insolence, Respectful or Not-So-Respectful, that you all crave. So, given that this is Friday, I thought I'd to a "rerun" of a bit of classic woo. This one's a little newer than the reruns I usually do, only a little less than two years old. So, if you've been reading less than two years, it's new to you! Maybe I'll even post another one later.
Ever since I started this little vanity bit known as Your Friday Dose of Woo, lo, these nearly three years ago, when I…
oracknows | February 28, 2011Say it ain't so, Dr. Pho!
Back when I first started blogging over six years ago, one of the first medical blogs I came across was KevinMD, the weblog of one Dr. Kevin Pho. Back then, of course, Dr. Pho's blog wasn't anywhere near the medblogging juggernaut that it is now, a part of Medpage Today. Indeed, Kevin was one of my early influences, although, as you can see, I never managed to get the whole brevity in writing thing down. Or the whole commercial savvy thing, either. Or the team blogging thing, either. Respectful Insolence was and remains a one man operation (or one Plexiglass box of…
oracknows | February 27, 2011Naturopathy has been a recurrent topic on this blog. The reasons should be obvious. Although homeopathy is the one woo to rule them all in the U.K. and much of Europe, here in the U.S. homeopathy is not nearly as big a deal. Arguably, some flavor of naturopathy is the second most prevalent "alternative medical system" here, after chiropractic of course, and perhaps duking it out with traditional Chinese medicine, although naturopathy does embrace TCM as part of the armamentarium of dubious medical systems that it uses. In any case, some sixteen states and five Canadian provinces license…
oracknows | February 25, 2011It's Friday. That means I'm in the mood for something more amusing. In the past, I used to use Fridays to have some fun with some particularly outrageous bit of woo, such as quantum homeopathy or DNA activation. Lately, I haven't done Your Friday Dose of Woo nearly as often as I used to, but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate good woo when I see it. However, some bits of craziness just aren't suitable for YFDoW not so much because they aren't crazy enough but because of the deadly seriousness of the intent or because they lack that light-hearted bit of looniness that characterizes the…
oracknows | February 22, 2011Over the years, I've said it many times. Competent adults have the right (or should have the right) to choose or refuse any medical treatment they wish for any reason. It doesn't matter how ridiculous the reason might be. If a competent adult believes that magic water (i.e., homeopathy) can cure him of cancer, we can try to persuade him that such a view is at odds with reality, but in the end personal autonomy and the right to self-determination mean that there will be a few people who will refuse effective medication in favor of quackery. A major force in motivating people to choose…
oracknows | February 18, 2011Here's a chance for some skeptical activism if you happen to live in New York and its environs. It's book promotion event for the most recent anti-vaccine propaganda piece, Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children by Louise Kuo Habakus and Mary Holland. Naturally, the propaganda blog for all things anti-vaccine, Age of Autism, is furiously pimping away in a histrionic post entitled Is it Ethical to Kill Children to Save Children? Friday Night NYC Event Explains:
Should the government promote a…
oracknows | February 16, 2011$37 million.
If you were a medical school dean or a hospital administrator and had $37 million for a project, how woud you use it? What would you build? What would you renovate? What research projects would you fund? What infrastructure improvements would you make? Yes, $37 million is a lot of green. Back at my old job, if memory serves me correctly, a whole new addition to the cancer center that nearly tripled its square footage cost somewhere in the range of $35-40 million. True, that was nearly ten years ago; so building the same building might now cost more than $37 million. My point…