Quackery
oracknows | January 14, 2011I'm tired.
Well, not exactly. I think I'm just suffering a case of what I like to call "anti-vax burnout." It's been a busy couple of weeks on the antivaccine front, given the new set of revelations about Andrew Wakefield, including even more detail about the nature of the scientific fraud he committed and previously untold information regarding just how extensive his business plans were to profit from the MMR scare that his fraudulent science was instrumental in launching in the U.K. Regular readers know that, from time to time, when the news about the anti-vaccine movement is coming fast…
oracknows | January 13, 2011It is with some trepidation and more than a little regret that I begin writing this piece. The reason for my hesitation is that, by doing so, no matter what I say I'll be inserting myself into what appears to be a disagreement among people all of whom I admire very much. I don't really want to do it, but I feel obligated, because the issues brought up in the disagreement are important, and reasonable people can disagree--sometimes strongly--about them. I also believe that someone whom I admire greatly has made a regrettable mistake.
Over the last week or so, I've been blogging a lot about the…
oracknows | January 11, 2011One of the favorite attacks favored by advocates of pseudoscience, particularly advocates of the sort of pseudoscience favored by proponents of "alternative" medicine, particularly the more militant ones who really, really detest conventional, science-based medicine, is to poison the well with a pre-emptive ad hominem attack that implies that defenders of science-based medicine are somehow interested in nothing but money. The first favored attack is to point out that the pharmaceutical industry is interested in nothing but money. That's partially true (they are, after all, for profit…
oracknows | January 10, 2011Remember how early this morning I posted about Mike Adam's despicable and ghoulish attempt to seize on the tragedy of the shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) by Jared Lee Loughner as a way of blaming the pharmaceutical industry and government for his violent rampage and intentionally conflating the decrying of violent rhetoric that might have helped to inspire a probably mentally ill individual to commit an act of mass murder? At the time, I observed that, whenever I think that Mike Adams has gone as low as he can go, he always manages to prove me wrong and go even lower…
oracknows | January 9, 2011I've written a lot about Mike Adams, the man who founded NaturalNews.com and has been one of the most prominent promoters of quackery on the Internet. Indeed, Mike Adams appears to be battling it out with Joe Mercola for the title of owning the biggest quackery website on the Internet. There's one area, however, where Mike Adams clearly reigns supreme, and that's latching on, ghoul-like, to major tragedies in order to promote his pro-quackery agenda. For example, when former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow died of metastatic colon cancer a couple of years ago, Mike Adams was right there…
oracknows | January 5, 2011Pity poor Andrew Wakefield.
2010 was a terrible year for him, and 2011 is starting out almost as bad. In February 2010, the General Medical Council in the U.K. recommended that Wakefield be stripped of his license to practice medicine in the U.K. because of scientific misconduct related to his infamous 1998 case series published in The Lancet, even going so far as to refer to him as irresponsible and dishonest, and in May 2010 he was. This case series, thanks to Wakefield's scientific incompetence and fraud, coupled with his flair for self-promotion and enabled by the sensationalistic…
oracknows | January 5, 2011Hmmmm. Somehow I didn't think this was what one normally thinks of when one hears the term "coming out":
You know. Sometimes tolerance is not called for.
oracknows | January 3, 2011About a week ago, I laid a bit of the ol' Orac-style ultra-snarkiness on CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta for having done an embarrassingly credulous interview with two of Oprah's minions who participated in the atrocity that was Oprah's episode about faith healer John of God. One of the most disappointing things about Dr. Gupta's interview is that he seemed fairly clueless about John of God's "forceps in the nose" trick. Well, while I happened to be perusing incoming links last night, I came across the very good Skepdic article on John of God. Honored that Orac would be…
oracknows | December 30, 2010Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
I realize I say these things again and again and again, but they bear repeating because together they are a message that needs to be spread in as clear and unambiguous a form as possible. First, whenever you hear someone say, "I'm not anti-vaccine," there's always a "but" after it, and that "but" almost always demonstrates that the person is anti-vaccine after all. Second, for antivaccine loons, it's always about the vaccines. Always. It's not primarily about autism advocacy; it's primarily about the vaccines and blaming them for autism. Autism…
oracknows | December 27, 2010File this under another "better late (as in after Christmas) than never."
Remember Elyse Anders? Remember how she successfully rallied skeptical activists to try to put the kibosh on an effort by the anti-vaccine group SafeMinds to infiltrate theaters with their commercials desguised as public service announcements over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend? Remember how she actually had considerable success, particularly with AMC Theaters? Well, it turns out that our job might not yet be done:
Last night, after I had a glass of wine and a delicious butter pecan cupcake, I got a disturbing text…
oracknows | December 27, 2010Christmas is over. Heck even Boxing Day is over. Still, Orac is doing something very unusual for him in that he's taking a bit of a staycation at home. Consider it a sanity break. Even though I'll be working on grants and a variety of other projects at home and even though I haven't signed out my pager to one of my partners, it is still a very good thing indeed not to see the inside of my office for ten days. As for blogging, understandably, given that readership has fallen off markedly the week between Christmas and New Years each and every year since I started blogging way back in 2004, I…
oracknows | December 24, 2010This being Christmas Eve and all, I hadn't planned on blogging. However, sometimes things happen that demand a change in plans. Consequently, although I don't plan on doing one of my usual logorrheic treatments of this issue, I do plan on mentioning something, because sometimes schadenfreude is a most excellent Christmas gift.
Remember Dr. Rolando Arafiles, Jr., a physician at Winkler County Memorial Hospital in Kermit, TX? He's the doctor trying to foist a whole boatload of woo on his patients about whom two brave nurses, Vicki Galle, RN, and Anne Mitchell, RN, complained to the Texas…
oracknows | December 21, 2010When it comes to "alternative" medical practices from Asia (or from anywhere else, for that matter), I've ceased to be surprised by anything I hear. After all, if somehow, some way, people can justify just about any strange health that can be imagined. If you don't believe me, I have two words for you: Coffee enemas. If you still don't believe me, I have two more words for you: black salve (i.e., burning skin lesions off). Still don't believe me? I have three more words for you:
Vaginal steam baths.
Yep. I learned about it in a news story in the L.A. Times yesterday entitled Vaginal steam…
oracknows | December 20, 2010During the six years of its existence, one frequent complaint I've had on this blog, it's been about how the press covers various health issues. In particular, it's depressing to see how often dubious and even outright false health claims, such as the claim that vaccines cause autism, that cell phones or powerlines cause cancer, or that various questionable or even quack remedies work for various diseases are reported credulously. Often this takes the form of a journalistic convention that is more appropriate for politics and other issues but not so appropriate for scientific and medical…
oracknows | December 11, 2010Has it really been six years?
Six years ago today, on a dim and dreary Saturday in December, almost on a whim I sat down, went to Blogspot, and started up the first version of Respectful Insolence with an introductory post with the cliched title, Please allow me to introduce myself. Here it is, six years later. On this cold December Saturday, I still find it difficult to his blog is considered one of the "top" medical blogs by one measure, and some actually--shockingly--consider me somewhat of a "famous" skeptic. I know, I know, I still can't wrap my head around the concept myself. At least,…
oracknows | December 9, 2010I was originally going to switch it up and blog about something other than cancer. In fact, there is a particularly juicy bit of anti-vaccine nonsense that I wanted to write about because it shows the utter mendacity of a certain anti-vaccine website that, believe it or not, is not Age of Autism. I know, I know, it's hard to believe, but there actually is an anti-vaccine group that is giving Generation Rescue a run for its money when it comes to sheer crazy. It'll keep, though, until next week. In the meantime, I have even worse crazy to deal with. In the meantime, I have even more despicable…
oracknows | December 8, 2010Two women died of breast cancer yesterday. One was named Kim Tinkham. One was named Elizabeth Edwards.
In some ways, these women were similar. True, one was older than the other, but both of them died far sooner than they should have, one at age 53, the other at age 61. Both engaged in activism about breast cancer. Both were ambitious, driven women. Both died in the presence of their friends and family. Both died within hours of each other. Both demonstrated the implacable killer that breast cancer can be.
There the similarities end. One of these women (Kim Tinkham), for example, died…
oracknows | December 7, 2010It's been pointed out to me that it was announced three hours ago on the Caring for Kim Facebook page that Kim Tinkham has passed away. A woman named Dana Ponder announced:
Kim just passed. I was there by her side and it was peaceful. Thank you for all the kind words. I tried to read all the post to her, hoping she heard them all. She was (is) so loved.
From all indications I've been able to find, Kim died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer. And so a quack claims another victim.
And so Oprah Winfrey contributed.
And so a family mourns the loss of a mother, a spouse, a…
oracknows | December 7, 2010I'm still perturbed about yesterday.
I'm still perturbed that a cancer quack was able to convince a woman who had everything to live for that he could cure her of her breast cancer without surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. I'm still perturbed at this particular cancer quack's attitude, where he tried to claim that he didn't know the woman who is dying, Kim Tinkham, and imply that her cancer recurred because didn't follow his regimen carefully enough, that she had stopped living the quack's "alkaline diet." I thought of my mother-in-law, who died in 2009 of metastatic breast cancer, and…
oracknows | December 6, 2010In the wake of the revelation that Kim Tinkham is dying of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer to bones, lungs, and liver after having rejected conventional therapy for her disease in favor of Robert O. Young's acid-base woo, Young's response is now (possibly) known. In the comments after part 6 of Young's interview with Kim Tinkham (discussed by me here), a commenter by the 'nym of inhisgrace7 reports:
I wanted to find out for myself the truth so I wrote to Dr. Young and here is his response. Kim has always made her own decisions about cancer. Before I met her she had…