Quackery
oracknows | February 14, 2011Four days later, I still can't figure it out. I really can't.
Remember the other day when I said I was debating whether or not to respond to the latest excretion from one of the first hangers-on of the anti-vaccine movement I ever encountered after I started blogging. I'm referring, of course, to freelance journalist David Kirby, whose book Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Mystery, along with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s unbelievably brain dead Deadly Immunity, helped ignite the anti-vaccine fear mongering about mercury in vaccines back in 2005. My…
oracknows | February 12, 2011It's been pointed out to me that our old pal David Kirby, perhaps the cleverest antivaccine propagandist out there, is back at (where else?) The Huffington Post (a.k.a. HuffPo) asking why The Autism-Vaccine Debate: Why It Won't Go Away (short answer: because opportunists like Kirby have teamed with believers in pseudoscience to keep fanning the flames of this manufactroversy whenever they fade to embers). I've been debating whether it's worthwhile to produce a response to his disingenuously slimy arguments yet again, given that Kirby's being even more disingenuously slimy than usual. In the…
oracknows | February 11, 2011There's a quote attributed to philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer that is much beloved of cranks:
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
I hate this quote with a bloody passion. Actually, that's not quite true. Rather, I find it rather amusing in a pathetic sort of way, first because it's not true. Really, it's not. For instance, in science Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity wasn't exactly "violently opposed," and a lot of other scientific findings that challenge the existing paradigm have…
oracknows | February 10, 2011
Judge Orders Surgery For Teen Wrestler: MyFoxPHILLY.com
I have to be honest here. I don't know for sure what I think of the latest developments in the Mazeratti Mitchell case.
As you may recall from a couple of days ago, Mazeratti Mitchell is a 16 year old wrestler in Philadelphia who suffered a spinal cord injury while wrestling. Fortunately, given his subsequent course in which he has been recovering function, it was clearly not a complete transection of the spinal cord, but it was severe. His doctors recommended surgery to stabilize his spine and allow his injured spinal cord to heal.…
oracknows | February 8, 2011Things are pretty hairy this week, what with a couple of grant deadlines fast approaching, not to mention a rather important site visit at my institution later this week. As a result, I had been intending to post a "rerun" today, but then I saw something that just cracked me up so much that I couldn't resist taking a few minutes to do an uncharacteristically brief (for me) post about it.
Earlier this week, there was an announcement of a blockbuster deal in which AOL is buying that wretched hive of scum and quackery (take that, Dean Toney!), The Huffington Post, for $315 million. Since then,…
oracknows | February 7, 2011If there's one thing that gets my blood boiling almost above all else when it comes to quackery, it's when parents subject children to it. The result has been copious blogging about cases, such as that of Daniel Hauser, Katie Wernecke, and Abraham Cherrix, all of whom refused chemotherapy for treatable cancers. I've also discussed Madeline Neumann, a 12-year-old girl whose parents, based on their religion, allowed her to die of diabetic ketoacidosis rather than save her life by allowing physicians to administer insulin and fluids. They thought prayer would save her. It didn't.
The following…
oracknows | February 6, 2011Lest I be left out of the fun, I can't help but point out that over the weekend the Amazing One himself, James Randi, issued a challenge to homeopathy manufacturers and retail pharmacies that sell homeopathy, in particular large national chains like Walgreens and CVS and large national chains that include pharmacies in their stores, such as Walmart and Target. This was done in conjunction with the 10:23 Challenge, which is designed to demonstrate that homeopathy is nonsense. All over the world, skeptics and supporters of science-based medicine gathered to engage in overdoses of homeopathic…
oracknows | February 2, 2011Remember Medical Voices?
It's a group that I first discovered a year and a half ago that represented itself as a group of physicians and medical professionals who wanted to produce the "most comprehensive educational center on the Internet for physicians seeking the truth about vaccines." Of course, it didn't take me long to realize that MV was packed to the gills with the usual characters, antivaccine loons all, people such as Sherri Tenpenny, DO; Mayer Eisenstein, MD, JD, MPH; Harold Buttram, MD; and Leo Rebello, MD, ND, PhD. So copious were the utter nonsense, pseudoscience, misinformation…
oracknows | February 1, 2011Yesterday, I concluded that Dr. Mehmet Oz's journey to the Dark Side was continuing apace. After all, he had pulled the classic "bait and switch" of "alternative" medicine by allowing a man who calls himself Yogi Cameron to use his television show to co-opt the perfectly science-based modalities of diet and exercise as being somehow "alternative." Like all good promoters of woo, whether you call it "alternative" medicine, "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), or "integrative medicine" (IM), Yogi Cameron used diet and exercise as the thin edge of the wedge, behind which followed…
oracknows | January 31, 2011As I sat down to write this, I was torn. What topic to deconstruct? There appear to be so many! Certainly, the latest Huffington Post excretion by the ever-clueless (but amusing in his cluelessness, which results in posts of pure hilarity) Dana Ullman, entitled Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize Winner, Takes Homeopathy Seriously sure looked tempting. Ullman always makes an amusing target. However, I realized that I had already discussed Montagnier, not just once but twice in the last couple of months, first for promoting autism quackery and then, more recently, for having fallen hard for homeopathy…
oracknows | January 28, 2011Sometimes a comment in the comment thread after one of my posts ends up turning into the inspiration for another post. This is especially likely to happen if I respond to that comment and end up writing a comment of myself that seems way too good to waste, forever buried in the comments where, as soon as the commenting on the post dies down, it remains, unread again. So it was after my post on the "integration" of quackery into academic medical centers. In that post, I applied some of my inimitable not-so-Respectful Insolence to a deal between Georgetown University, what should be a bastion…
oracknows | January 26, 2011Beginning not long after this blog began, one recurring theme has been the infiltration of "quackademic medicine" into academic medical centers. Whether it be called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM), its infiltration into various academic medical centers has been one of the more alarming developments I've noted over the last several years. The reason is that "integrative" medicine is all too often in reality nothing more than "integrating" pseudoscience with science, quackery with medicine. After all, when you "integrate" something like reiki or…
oracknows | January 25, 2011I've on occasion been asked why I even bother responding to the brain--and I do use the term loosely--droppings of Mike Adams, the purveyor of one of the largest repositories of quackery on the entire Internet. Good question. Sometimes I wonder that myself. After all, Adams is so far out there, so beyond the realm of rational thought, so full of bizarre conspiracy theories and defenses of quackery that anyone the least bit rational and science-based should be able to see through his nonsense. Applying a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence to someone as reality-challenged as Mike…
oracknows | January 21, 2011
Over the last three weeks, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been publishing a multipart expose by investigative journalist Brian Deer that enumerated in detail the specifics of how a British gastroenterologist turned hero of the anti-vaccine movement had committed scientific fraud by falsifying key aspects of case reports that he used as the basis of his now infamous 1998 Lancet article suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and a syndrome consisting of regressive autism and enterocolitis. Indeed, Deer even went so far as to describe Wakefield's fraud as "Piltdown medicine,"…
oracknows | January 20, 2011I was originally going to blog this yesterday, but Dr. Oz's offenses against science and medicine on his show that aired on Tuesday kind of pushed it out of the way. It's not that I didn't think the third part of Brian Deer's expose of Andrew Wakefield's fraud worthy of my attention. Rather, the Oz thing really got me peeved, peeved enough to push aside (temporarily, at least) Brian Deer's deconstruction of how the editors of The Lancet scrambled to cover their proverbial asses, which they proceeded to do with alacrity, as the title of Deer's article implies: The Lancet's two days to bury bad…
oracknows | January 18, 2011Stick a fork in Dr. Oz. He's done.
I know I've been highly critical of Dr. Mehmet Oz, Vice Chair of the Department of Surgery at Columbia University and medical director of the Integrative Medicine Program (i.e., Columbia's quackademic medicine) program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Those are his academic titles. More important, in terms of his promotion of pseudoscience, is his role as daytime medical show host. Dr. Oz's television show, called, appropriately enough, The Dr. Oz Show, is a direct result of his having been featured on Oprah Winfrey's show on numerous occasions as one of…
oracknows | January 17, 2011Something amazing happened on Friday. Unfortunately, I didn't get to blog it as soon as I would have liked because (1) it happened on Canadian TV and the video wasn't available to anyone outside of Canada until it showed up on YouTube and (2) Craig Willougby's changing his mind about Andrew Wakefield really did gobsmack me to the point that I had to blog about it, so rare is it for someone who used to accept pseudoscience to have the courage and intellectual honesty to admit publicly that he is changing his mind. Still, even though it's three days later, I didn't want to let this pass,…
oracknows | January 17, 2011I take back all those nice things I said about Dr. Oz.
Well, I never actually said that much nice about Dr. Oz, but I usually gave him at least a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, other than for his love or reiki. Then Dr. Oz had über quack Dr. Joe Mercola on his show (with Deepak Chopra, too!), leading me to ask whether Dr. Oz had finally crossed his Woo-bicon.
Well, if that wasn't Dr. Oz crossing the Woo-bicon, perhaps this is:
That's right. Dr. Oz is featuring Dr. Mercola on his show again, this time featuring him as The man your doctor doesn't want you to listen to. Never does…
oracknows | January 17, 2011What does it take to get an advocate of pseudoscience to change his or her mind? Many are the times I've asked myself that question. Over the years, I've covered the gamut of techniques, going from what some might call "militant" or even insulting to being as reasoned and calm as can be--and probably everywhere in between. It's not just the anti-vaccine movement, either, but the anti-vaccine movement provides a convenient example. This is particularly true because of the recently released revelations, both more detailed old and also new, about how anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield not only…
oracknows | January 16, 2011Oh, geez. Will the media never learn?
Yep, it looks as though Andrew Wakefield will be on Good Morning America tomorrow. True, it is a holiday in the U.S., but that just might mean that viewership will be higher because more people will be at home. I, of course, will be at work; so I probably won't get to see it until it's either on YouTube or the GMA website later. In the meantime, the promo is here. It's probably better that way, at least for my blood pressure.
Fallacious "tell both sides" journalism about scientific fraud and pseudoscience lives, it would appear.