Quackery
oracknows | October 20, 2010I really have to give those guys at McGill University's Office for Science and Society credit. They're fast. In fact, they've already uploaded video for all the events at the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium. Here's the main page with the videos (the 2010 Trottier Symposium occurred on October 17, 18, and 19), and here are the individual links:
2010 Lorne Trottier Roundtable (moderated by Dr. Joe Schwarcz)
2010 Lorne Trottier Public Syposium
Investigating Pseudoscientific & Paranormal Claims with James Randi
Enjoy!
My "friend" also reports that a great time was had by all and he…
oracknows | October 19, 2010The Lorne Trottier Symposium is over, and it went quite well. Amazingly, even though I had to follow Michael Shermer's talk, people told me I didn't suck, which made me feel better. Oh, there was this issue of a guy who wanted to tout Royal Rife and his machine. He wouldn't have irritated me so much for doing that. What did irritate me was that he went on and on and on and wouldn't yield the microphone, to the point where I tried to interrupt him to ask him if he had a question and then ended up being perhaps too dismissive of his question. On the other hand, even Michael Shermer told him, "…
oracknows | October 17, 2010Damn. Every so often another blogger will think of something that I really, really wished I'd thought of before. Times like this, and this handy-dandy alternative medicine flow chart.
I do think he missed one thing, though. Just because someone doesn't like having stuff shoved up their posterior doesn't mean they won't be into "detox." Colonic irrigation is part of many "detox" regimens. Of course, much woo overlaps; so you can't make any hard and fast rules. Consider this chart a guide instead.
oracknows | October 15, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. I happen to be sitting here in Palm Beach, Florida, but I'm not chilling at the beach or pool. Rather, I'm attending "leadership training." Yes, be very, very afraid! In any case, I never saw the point of having these sorts of training seminars at beautiful oceanfront locations if they're going to pack the entire day with, you know, actual training! Worse (for purposes of blogging), I really have to fine tune my…
oracknows | October 15, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. I happen to be sitting here in Palm Beach, Florida, but I'm not chilling at the beach or pool. Rather, I'm attending "leadership training." Yes, be very, very afraid! In any case, I never saw the point of having these sorts of training seminars at beautiful oceanfront locations if they're going to pack the entire day with, you know, actual training! Worse (for purposes of blogging), I really have to fine tune my…
oracknows | October 14, 2010A couple of weeks ago, as Breast Cancer Awareness Week was approaching, I was highly disturbed to see everybody's favorite wretched hive of scum and quackery (The Huffington Post, in case you didn't know) promoting a dubious breast cancer testimonial for quackery. This testimonial, contained in a book entitled You Did What? Saying "No" to Conventional Cancer Treatment and promoted in a HuffPo post by an acupuncturist named One Woman's Story: Saying No to Conventional Cancer Treatment, on the surface sounded as though a woman named Hollie Quinn had eschewed all conventional therapy after being…
oracknows | October 12, 2010I sometimes think I ought to send a thank you letter to Dr. Mark Hyman.
True, I don't owe him quite as much as I owe, for example, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com, anyone on the blogging crew of the anti-vaccine crank propaganda blog Age of Autism, Dr. Jay Gordon, or several other pseudoscientists, quacks, or other assorted cranks who have provided me with blogging material over the last five years. However, whether he's mangling autism science, postulating dubious "personalized medicine" for Alzheimer's disease, championing that form of quackery known as "functional medicine," trying to…
oracknows | October 10, 2010Over the weekend, I saw a rather fascinating post by Sullivan entitled A Sense of Civil Discourse. The reason I found it so fascinating is because what was quoted in it utterly destroyed my irony meter yet again, leaving it nothing but a molten, gooey mess still bubbling and hissing in my office. Apparently last week, Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted, authors of the distillation of all the craziness that is the blog Age of Autism into book form under the same title, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, did a radio interview on the Leonard Lopate Show. During the…
oracknows | October 5, 2010One of the favorite fallacious arguments favored by pseudoscientists and denialists of science is the ever infamous "science was wrong before" gambit, wherein it is argued that, because science is not perfect or because scientists are not perfect, then science is not to be trusted. We've seen it many times before. Indeed, we saw it just yesterday, when promoters of quackery and anti-vaccine cranks leapt all over the revelation that American scientists had intentionally infected Guatemalan prisoners with syphilis without their consent as part of an experiment in the 1940s. They didn't attack…
oracknows | October 4, 2010If there's one thing that burns me about so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) clinical trials, it's how unethical many of them are. This is particularly true for trials that test modalities that, on the basic science grounds alone, can be dismissed as so highly implausible and with such a low prior probability of success that it is unethical to subject patients to risk with close to zero potential for benefit. Perhaps the most egregious example of such a clinical trial is the Gonzalez protocol in pancreatic cancer, a cornucopia of woo and quackery including up to 150…
oracknows | October 1, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times, thanks to R01 deadlines. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in September 2007 that, shockingly, as far as I can tell I've never "rerun" before. Remember, if you've been reading less than three years it's probably new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than three years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged.
As I usually do on Thursday nights, I was perusing my legendary Folder…
oracknows | September 29, 2010It's grant crunch time, which almost always means that a lot of stuff happens that I don't have time to write about and that the week after I submit it (i.e., next week) usually nothing interesting happens to write about and I'm left posting LOL Cats or something like that. Be that as it may, sometimes something happens that goads me to the point where I have to comment, although reality keeps me from my usual logorrhea. Who knows, maybe that's a good thing.
In any case, yesterday Brandon Thorp (who also works for the JREF) teamed up with Penn Bullock to write a disturbing report on just how…
oracknows | September 27, 2010I hate The Huffington Post. I really do.
Why, you ask, do I hate HuffPo so? I hate HuffPo so because of its history from the very beginning of its existence of promoting the vilest forms of anti-vaccine quackery and pseudoscience. It's because, over the last couple of years, not content with being the one-stop-shop for all things antivax on the Internet, right up there with Whale.to, Mercola.com, and NaturalNews.com, HuffPo branched out very early into quantum quackery, courtesy of Deepak Chopra. Just search for "Huffington Post" and "Deepak Chopra" on this blog and you'll discover how many…
oracknows | September 24, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. Besides getting into full R01 grant-writing swing, I went out to dinner last night with a visiting professor and didn't get home until too late for me to grind out one of those 2,000-4,000 word screeds you've come to know and a love. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in November 2006 that, shockingly, as far as I can tell I've never "rerun" before. Remember, if you've been reading less than four…
oracknows | September 23, 2010Naturopathy is a strange beast in the "alternative medicine" world. From what I've been able to tell, it's a wastebasket specialty with no overarching philosophical underpinnings, as traditional Chinese medicine underpins acupuncture or sympathetic magic underpins homeopathy. Basically, if it's woo, naturopaths will use it. Acupuncture, TCM, homeopathy, herbalism, nutritional woo, detox, it doesn't matter. To naturopaths, it's all good, as long as it isn't "conventional medicine." Wait. Not quite. After all naturopaths have been fighting for (and in some cases getting) prescribing authority…
oracknows | September 20, 2010This guy would appear to be screwed:
The rat running by the acupuncturist's door is a nice touch, too. And so appropriate.
oracknows | September 15, 2010I'm a cancer surgeon.
I started out as a general surgeon, but my passion and scientific interest goaded me into specializing in cancer. Ultimately, I ended up subspecializing even more, ultimately becoming a breast cancer surgeon, but through it all cancer, not just breast cancer, has remained my clinical and scientific passion. So has science-based medicine. Developed as a response to the concept of "evidence-based medicine" (EBM), SBM postulates that clinical care should be based on the best science available, including the consideration of basic sciences and prior probability. EBM…
oracknows | September 12, 2010THE PAST IS PROLOGUE
Location: Central New Jersey, deep within the brick and steel of a secret pharma base.
Year: 1999.
A shadowy figure dressed in gray, bald, and stroking a white cat enters a nondescript room in the middle of which sits a massive conference table. More than a dozen men and women leap to their feet at attention and wait until the man pauses at the head of the table and then very deliberately sits in high-backed leather chair.
Shadowy figure: Have they arrived?
Lackey #1: Yes, Leader.
Shadowy figure: Let them wait a few minutes. First, we have pressing business. You have…
oracknows | September 7, 2010After chilling out for part of the weekend, yesterday I became so engrossed in writing my part of a training grant for my postdoc that, before I knew it, it was way too late to provide you with the Insolence you crave for today. Oh, well. Tomorrow for sure; there's a lot that has been waiting for my attention. Besides, I haven't even really taken a vacation this summer; so I deserve a day or two (or three) off from time to time. In the meantime, I'll post a couple of bits of "classic" (if you can call it that) Insolence. This particular bit of insolence dates back nearly four years, all the…
oracknows | September 5, 2010In case you hadn't guessed, because of the holiday weekend, blogging's been rather slow. This is in general a good thing, a chance to rest and rethink, but occasionally, even while chilling out, I see things that I can't resist mentioning briefly. Things like this.
If there's one thing about "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) that has always puzzled me, it's that, at least here in the "West," there seems to be an inordinate fascination with ancient "Eastern" medical systems. These include, of course, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Indian Ayruvedic medicine, both of which…