Quackery
oracknows | March 9, 2010I have a hard time arguing against the proposition that this is the perfect metaphor for homeopathy.
Well, not exactly. The homeopath and homeopathy user are both far too rational in this example.
oracknows | March 8, 2010I haven't written much about this before, at least not in this context, but vaccine scares are nothing new, nor is execrably fear mongering journalism about vaccines. Those of you who read Paul Offit's Autism's False Prophets or Arthur Allen's Vaccine probably know about a particularly egregious example of both that occurred in the early 1980s and concerned the DTP (diptheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine. In 1982, the local NBC affiliate in Washington, DC aired a special report entitled DPT: Vaccine Roulette. Indeed, Vaccine Roulette was the prototype of the muck-raking, sensationalistic sort…
oracknows | March 8, 2010If there's one law that (most) supporters of science-based medicine detest and would love to see repealed, it's the Dietary Supplement and Health Act of 1994 (DSHEA). The reason is that this law, arguably more than almost anything else, allowed for the proliferation of supplements and claims made for these supplements that aren't based in science. In essence, the DSHEA created a new class of regulated entity called dietary supplements. At the same time, it liberalized the rules for information and claims that the supplement manufacturers can transmit to the public and while at the same time…
oracknows | March 4, 2010Now that's what I'm talking about! This is what we need to see more of! A father whose child underwent the quackery that is the Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) protocol is suing the doctors who administered it for malpractice:
The father of a 7-year-old Chicago boy who was diagnosed as a toddler with autism has sued the Naperville and Florida doctors who treated his son, alleging they harmed the child with "dangerous and unnecessary experimental treatments."
James Coman and his son were featured last year in "Dubious Medicine," a Tribune series that examined risky, unproven treatments for autism…
oracknows | March 4, 2010Homeopaths are irritating.
They're irritating for a number of reasons. One is their magical thinking, and, make no mistake, their thinking is nothing but pure magic, sympathetic magic to be precise. That's all that the principle of "like cures like" really is at its heart. Normally, that principle states that "like produces like," but homeopathy reverses that principle by saying that, while like produces like at normal concentrations, like reverses like at high dilutions. Somehow the magical process of shaking the remedy very hard between each dilution step (called "succussion") imbues it…
oracknows | March 3, 2010
Help! Help! I'm being repressed.
Somehow, that is the image I have gotten in the three weeks since the very last shred of Andrew Wakefield's facade of scientific respectability tumbled. As you may recall, at the end of January, the British General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield, the man whose trial lawyer-funded, breathtakingly incompetent, and quite possibly fraudulent study in 1998 launched the most recent iteration of the anti-vaccine movement, not to mention a thousand (actually, many more) autism quacks, guilty of gross research misconduct, characterizing him as "irresponsible…
oracknows | March 1, 2010I've had it with Dr. Oz.
Although I haven't seen his show today (for one thing, I work for a living; for another thing, even if I had today off I wouldn't waste it watching Dr. Oz's show), readers have informed me that yesterday, on March 1, 2010, Dr. Oz threw away whatever shred of respectability that he had left. On March 1, 2010, Dr. Oz had Deepak Chopra on his show.
But that wasn't enough.
After all, Chopra is a never-ending font of woo in categories too numerous to recount here, a small subset of which includes evolution, neuroscience, and medicine, but most of his woo is is fairly "…
oracknows | February 26, 2010I realize that there are two huge target-rich articles out there that my readers have been clamoring for me to comment on. First, there's a particularly silly and simplistic article by Nicholas Kristof about how it's supposedly the "toxins" causing autism (an article in which he apparently doesn't realize that Current Opinions in Pediatrics is not really a peer-reviewed journal but rather publishes review articles by invitation), and then there's a fawning TIME Magazine article bout Jenny McCarthy. When two such--shall we say?--target-rich articles appear on the same day, I'd be falling all…
oracknows | February 25, 2010Pity the poor Haitians.
Not only is their nation dirt poor, but to kick off 2010, they suffered an earthquake that killed approximately a quarter of a million people, left at least 300,000 injured, and resulted in 1,000,000 homeless. Huge swaths of its capital of Port au Prince and Léogâne, among other cities, had been leveled. The devastation was (and remains) almost beyond comprehension, and it will be years, if not decades, before Haiti can recover. Disease and hunger are rampant. In the immediate aftermath, looting and violence were common.
Unfortunately, disaster seems to attract…
oracknows | February 23, 2010How does homeopathy work? Heh.
Yes, this is in honor of my post earlier today.
I'm also appreciative that homeopaths have apparently diagnosed what's wrong with Parliament. Apparently it's emitting an angry purple aura.
oracknows | February 22, 2010Sometimes politicians actually get it right.
I know, I know, it makes me choke on my words to admit it, but sometimes politicians can actually get science right. I'm referring to something that happened in the U.K., yesterday, when the Science and Technology Select Committee delivered its verdict on homeopathy. Indeed, the Committee has gone so far as to call for the complete withdrawal of NHS funding and official licensing for homeopathy. The report is called Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, and I'll cut to the chase. This is what the report concluded:
By providing homeopathy on the NHS and…
oracknows | February 21, 2010I must admit that I never saw it coming. At least, I never saw it coming this fast and this dramatically. After all, this is a saga that has been going on for twelve solid years now, and it's an investigation that has been going on at least since 2004. I'm referring, of course, to that (possibly former) hero of the anti-vaccine movement, the man who is arguably the most responsible for suffering and death due to the resurgence of measles in the U.K. because of his role in frightening parents about the MMR vaccine.
I'm referring to the fall of Andrew Wakefield
Wakefield has shown an incredible…
oracknows | February 18, 2010What is it with cranks and trying to shut down criticism?
I know, I know. I've written about this before, but this week has been a banner week for a phenomenon that I consider a sine qua non of a crank or a quack, namely an intolerance of criticism. Seemingly, whenever a quack or a crank encounters serious criticism, the first reaction is almost never to try to argue based on facts, reason, and science, but rather to try to silence the person doing the criticizing. The tactics are many and varied, but the end goal is always the same: Suppress the criticism by any means necessary. The very…
oracknows | February 18, 2010Last night, it came to light from a posting on the Thoughtful House Yahoo! discussion group that Andrew Wakefield has apparently resigned from Thoughtful House. I have yet to see confirmation anywhere, although Brian Deer has chimed in that this comes as no surprise to him and that he suspects that Dr. Arthur Krigsman, Anyssa Ryland, and Jane Johnson are behind Wakefield's ouster. However, more interesting is this comment from Liz Ditz. In it, she points out a couple of interesting bits of background.
Tidbit #1 from 2008:
In 2007 alone, Thoughtful House saw 1,500 new patient requests -- or…
oracknows | February 17, 2010I'm hearing this from multiple sources, who are forwarding me this message from the Yahoo! Thoughtful House Group:
Dr. Wakefield has resigned from Thoughtful House
The needs of the children we serve must always come first. All of us at Thoughtful House are grateful to Dr. Wakefield for the valuable work he has done here. We fully support his decision to leave Thoughtful House in order to make sure that the controversy surrounding the recent findings of the General Medical Council does not interfere with the important work that our dedicated team of clinicians and researchers is doing on…
oracknows | February 17, 2010I happened to be listening to the Holocaust Denial On Trial podcast yesterday, specifically this episode which is a recording of a speech given by Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt about Holocaust denial and her experiences being sued for libel in Britain by arch Holocaust denier David Irving, who, much like the British Chiropractic Association taking advantage of the U.K.'s highly plaintiff-friendly libel laws to sue Simon Singh for libel now, took advantage of those same libel laws back in the late 1990s to sue Deborah Lipstadt. In the speech, she takes a position that I have argued on…
oracknows | February 16, 2010Remember Mark and David Geier?
I wouldn't be surprised if regular readers may have forgotten about this father-son tag team of anti-vaccine lunacy and autism woo. After all, I haven't written about them since journalist Trine Tsouderos did her expose of their "Lupron protocol" for the Chicago Tribune nine months ago. Long time readers, however, will remember the Geiers. They were one of the very first autism-related topics I wrote about after joining ScienceBlogs four years ago, when I wrote about them in a little ditty I called Why not just castrate them? The reason that I gave my post the…
oracknows | February 15, 2010I feel really, really good today.
The reason? Simple Orac has annoyed Jim Carrey enough to ban him on Twitter. The exchange went something like this. For the first time in a while, I was perusing Twitter (I have a really hard time keeping my Insolence to 140 characters; so I only check my Twitter account maybe once or twice a week) when I saw someone mention a couple of Tweets by Jim Carrey that went like this:
Dr. Andrew Wakefield's studies r being unfairly supressed. His newest vacs vs unvacs study MUST BE PUBLISHED. RT "Show Me The Monkeys!" ;^)
Folks, it's a REAL STUDY of chimps subjected…
oracknows | February 13, 2010The silliness about Morgellons and Marc Neumann continues. This time around, it's someone sending me e-mail from Dr. Rolando Arafile's website. In my e-mail last night I found this gem:
From: "Health2Fit" health@health2fit.net
Subject: Violation
Date: February 12, 2010 3:54:59 PM EST
To: "Orac" orac@scienceblogs.com
Please remove our videos that you have on your blog. There are not there with any permissions.
I will not get into the politics of all this, everyone has an opinion, just remove the videos.
Webmaster
H2F
My response follows:
Dr. Arafiles (or is it Mr. Neumann?):
Three points:
1.…
oracknows | February 13, 2010The utter discrediting and disgrace of Andrew Wakefield, first by the judgment of the General Medical Council against him and then by the retraction of the crown jewel of his respectability his 1998 Lancet paper that sparked the modern anti-vaccine movement and launched a thousand autism quacks. The reaction of the anti-vaccine loons was very predictable, with Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey producing a hilariously paranoid conspiracy theory and J.B. Handley following suit with more monkey business. Truly, the downfall of their hero, which has been a long time in coming but has finally arrived…