Quackery
oracknows | October 27, 2009
About a month and half ago, we learned that über-quack Hulda Clark, the woman who said that she had the Cure for All Cancers, had died on September 3, 2009. I was criticized for entitling my post Requiem for a Quack, but, given how Clark's quackery had contributed to the suffering and deaths of an unknown number of cancer patients, I didn't really feel too bad about it, although I do realize that the taboo about speaking ill of the recently dead is a strong one.
At the time, I was curious what the cause of Dr. Clark's death was, because it seemed rather mysterious, being described as the…
oracknows | October 23, 2009Thank you, Mike Adams. You've saved my blogging posterior yet again.
What do I mean? Well, I had originally intended to do a lucid, insightful, penetrating analysis of a scientific study today. However, when I got home last night after a hard day in clinic I was just too tired. So, faced with that, I had a choice: either no bloggy for you tomorrow, or I could take on something that wasn't quite so--shall we say?--demanding, something more in line with what my fragile eggshell mind could deal with after a 12 hour day at work.
Enter woo-meister supreme, Mike Adams. And, boy, is he ticked off.…
oracknows | October 22, 2009Before I move on for a while from the topic of that faded 1970s comic actress, Suzanne Somers, whose latest book is a paean to cancer quackery and who has been carpetbombing the airwaves with burning napalm stupid, I think one revelation is worth a brief mention. Specifically, after my post about how I find Somers' story about being misdiagnosed with cancer, a fan wrote:
Orac,
Sarcoidosis? Nope. Wrong again. Suzanne admitted on TV she had an acute pulmonary fungal infection, valley fever. Try going back to medical school, you mental midget.
I do so love the adoration of my fans. However, it…
oracknows | October 22, 2009I hadn't planned on writing about Suzanne Somers again so soon. After all, I haven't yet received the promotional copy of her book (Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer--And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place) that a most generous reader has sent to me, and I didn't think I'd have a chance until a few days after the book arrived. However, something's been bothering me since yesterday's post, and it's bothering me enough that I think it deserves a followup post of its own. I alluded to it briefly during part of my post, but I really think it's something to be…
oracknows | October 21, 2009There are two times a year that seem to be a time to beware of a serious assault of pseudoscience and quackery. The first time of year is in April, which is Autism Awareness Month. Over the last few years I can be just as sure as night following day, only to be followed by day again, that the anti-vaccine movement will use the occasion of Autism Awareness month to hit the airwaves with a blistering barrage of brain-dead buffoonery about vaccines and autism. This year, it consisted of Jenny McCarthy hitting Larry King Live with her equally brain dead boyfriend Jim Carrey, as well as Generation…
oracknows | October 19, 2009Many have been the times over the last five years that I've called out bad journalism about medicine in general and vaccines in particular, especially the coverage of the discredited notion that vaccines or mercury in vaccines somehow was responsible for the "autism epidemic." That's why I feel a special responsibility to highlight good reporting on the issue. Indeed, reporting on this issue is so uniformly awful that when I see something this good, I want to do everything in my power to hawk the hell out of it. So, I want you to read this article in the November issue of WIRED Magazine…
oracknows | October 19, 2009Every so often, as the health care reform initiative spearheaded by the Obama Administration wends its way through Congress (or, more precisely, wend their ways through Congress, given that there are multiple bills coming from multiple committees in both Houses), I've warned about various chicanery from woo-friendly legislators trying to legitimize by legislation where they've failed by science various "alternative" medicine practices. This began much earlier this year, when I pointed out how Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) invited the Four Horsemen of the Woo-pocalypse to the Senate to testify.…
oracknows | October 17, 2009Here we go again. The 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine wingnut and lover of cancer quackery Bill Maher, decided to use the occasion of the season finale of Real Time with Bill Maher to answer some of the criticisms that have been leveled against him. All I can say is this: I'm incredibly grateful that this is the season finale of Maher's show. I don't think I can take much more of his moronic anti-science stances being proudly trumpeted.
It was painful to watch and showed very much that Bill Maher still doesn't get it. In fact, if anything, he escalated his quack…
oracknows | October 14, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, over the last few days I was in Chicago attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting. At least, that's where I was until last evening. Unfortunately, I got back home too late and was thus too tired to lay down some fresh Insolence, Respectful or otherwise, for your edification today. Fear not, though. I'll get to it. In the meantime, here's another blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
Well, this is encouraging to see: A…
oracknows | October 13, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
I tried not to write about the altie obsession with "detoxification" again. Really, I did. It gets repetitive, and I don't…
oracknows | October 12, 2009No mà s! No mà s! I surrender!
I give up!
I tried. I really, really did try. I tried really, really hard not to look at the flaming idiocy of Bill Maher again, much less comment on it again. Here I am, in Chicago at the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, taking in all sorts of surgical goodness, trying to take a break from blogging. It's not so much to ask, is it? I didn't think so, anyway.
Then, exactly a week after he accepted the Richard Dawkins Award, Bill Maher couldn't help it but let his freak flag fly! In fact, he started out an interview with Bill Frist by asking:
"…
oracknows | October 9, 2009Surgeons, especially general surgeons, know that the middle of October is an important time of year. One thing that hospitals notice is that the surgery schedule in the O.R. often slows down considerably for several days. If you're the junior surgeon or otherwise the low man on the totem pole, you suddenly find that it's easy to get O.R. time, that you can book cases at times you normally couldn't before, and that you might even get the better rooms. The reason? Simple. The middle of October is the time when the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress takes place, and that's where I'm…
oracknows | October 8, 2009Orac's anti-stupidity circuits just took a serious beating. It's kind of like Star Trek, when the Enterprise is being battered by multiple Klingon warships. After multiple phaser and photon torpedo hits, its shields are down to 10% and in danger of failing.
Orac is feeling sort of like that right now, except that it was a single massive photon torpedo of stupid that hit his logic circuits, courtesy of someone named Jeffrey, who commented:
Orac forgot to mention, in his attempt to character assassinate Dawn, to compensate for body weight compensation for, lets say a 6 lb baby.
A baby gets the…
oracknows | October 8, 2009Quackademic medicine has struck again. Worse, it's struck at one of my old stomping grounds. OK, not exactly, but rather close to a past home.
Let me back up a minute.
I know someone who attended nursing school at UMDNJ. It's actually a very good nursing school, but, alas, it has a serious woo streak in it. Yesterday, because of that connection, I was shown a pamphlet that had arrived in the mail. It was a the Continuing Education Catalog for the UMDNJ School of Nursing. At first glance, it looked pretty unremarkable. There were the usual courses in subjects like trauma nursing, clinical…
oracknows | October 6, 2009Alright, I think I got the whole Maher/Dawkins thing out of my system for now. True, given the highly annoying reaction of one reader, I was half-tempted to write yet another post on the whole fiasco just out of spite, but I decided that spite in and of itself was not a good reason to write a blog post. Well, in this case it isn't, anyway, but if it were someone like Vox Day, or J.B. Handley, or a hapless quack or creationist, well, a wee bit of spite can make for some mighty fine blogging that's really fun to write. True, spite should never be the be-all and end-all of a blog, but certainly…
oracknows | October 4, 2009My first hometown, as many readers of this blog know, is Detroit, where I spent the first ten years or so of my life. My second hometown, as I pointed out a while back when a particularly loony city council candidate caught the eye of the skeptical blogosphere.
Unfortunately, I just found out that there's some more looniness going on there in a little more than a week. My cousin e-mailed me this notice:
Event: Mrs. Michigan Autism Lecture
Date: Thursday, October 15, 2009
Time: 6:30pm Location: Zerbo's Health Foods
Event Details:
Heidi Scheer is a national spokesperson for Autism Awareness…
oracknows | October 4, 2009I hadn't planned on writing much, if anything more, about the whole Bill Maher debacle, but PZ has shown up in my comments and graciously tried to explain what's going on at the AAI convention regarding the truly awful choice of Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award:
Look, I don't know what else I can say. I didn't endorse Maher; if they'd run this decision by me months ago, I would have said, "Are you nuts?". But of course, I have no clout with the AAI. Dawkins consented to the award initially, because he didn't know much about the full views held by the crackpot; he would certainly have…
oracknows | October 3, 2009...from PZ Myers at the AAI Convention:
The good news for all the critics of this choice is that Dawkins pulled no punches. In his introduction, he praised Religulous and thanked Maher for his contributions to freethought, but he also very clearly and unambiguously stated that some of his beliefs about medicine were simply crazy. He did a good job of walking a difficult tightrope; he made it clear that the award was granted for some specific worthy matters, his humorous approach to religion, while carefully dissociating the AAI from any endorsement of crackpot medicine. It won't be enough, I…
oracknows | October 1, 2009
The endgame is in sight. At the end of this post is a list of questions for Bill Maher tomorrow (if the opportunity presents itself), the vast majority of which you, my readers, thought of.
Let's backtrack a minute.
A couple of months ago, I learned that an award named after Richard Dawkins was being given to someone who was so radically, unbelievably unworthy of such an honor, that I likened giving the Richard Dawkins Award to Bill Maher to giving a public health award to Jenny McCarthy. (In deference to Professor Dawkins, perhaps I'll now liken it to giving such an award to MMR anti-…
oracknows | September 30, 2009I wil probably lose some respect from some of my readers by admitting this, but I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Dan Brown novels. I actually enjoyed The Da Vinci Code immensely as a jolly good read, as long as you're not too much of a stickler for anything resembling historical accuracy. Ditto Angels & Demons, although even I cringed at one of the most ham-handed bits of author foreshadowing every put into a highly popular novel. (Those of you who've read Angels & Demons no doubt know exactly what I'm talking about.) In fact, I'll probably eventually get a copy of Dan Brown's…