Quackery
oracknows | June 14, 2009Last month, a frequent topic of this blog was the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy from Minnesota with Hodgkin's lymphoma who made the national news for his refusal (and his mother's support of that refusal) to undergo a second round of chemotherapy. Instead, he wanted to pursue "natural" therapy, including what sounded like alkalinization quackery. What was especially disturbing about this case was that he had a highly treatable form of cancer with close to a 90% expectation of long term survival with conventional treatment with chemotherapy and radiation. As with the cases of…
oracknows | June 14, 2009I bet you didn't know this (maybe because of homeopathic publicity), but today is the first day of Homeopathy Awareness Week, which runs from June 14 to 21.
It turns out that I'm torn over whether to mention or do much about this. On the one hand, publicizing the magical, mystical thinking that is homeopathy serves a purpose in emphasizing time and time again just how utterly implausible from a scientific standpoint homeopathy is, how most studies showing and "effect" from homeopathy are seriously flawed, and how the best quality studies of homeopathy show it to be no more effective than a…
oracknows | June 11, 2009I know I've been very hard on Oprah Winfrey the last couple of weeks, taking her to task for her promotion on her show of medicine that is at best dubious and at worst quackery, as promoted by frequent guests like Suzanne Somers, Dr. Christiane Northrup, and the queen of the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny "I'm not anti-vaccine but would never, ever vaccinate" McCarthy. Not that Oprah cares. After all, she's Oprah, and I'm only a lowly blogger who, although having one of the top medical blogs out there, is as an ant to Oprah's elephant of a media empire. Still, NEWSWEEK did a fantastic expose of…
oracknows | June 10, 2009I never thought I'd see it, but I have. After an a decent article on the infiltration of quackademic medicine into American medical centers and a very good article on cancer quackery, Marilyn Marchione of the AP has done it again:
AP IMPACT: $2.5B spent, no alternative med cures
It almost seems as though Ms. Marchione is channeling Orac:
BETHESDA, Md. -- Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.
Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo…
oracknows | June 10, 2009"Empowerment."
What a grand word! After all, who doesn't want to be "empowered"? Certainly not me. Perhaps that's the reason why it's become the new buzzword in a movement known as "patient-centered" care. Old fart that I am, I'm a bit puzzled by exactly what that term means. After all, I've always thought I have been practicing patient-centered care, ever since my first days in medical school, but apparently these days it means something different, at least if this article from a few days ago in the New York Times is any indication. It's an interview with Dr. Donald Berwick, who advocates…
oracknows | June 9, 2009Yesterday, I marveled at an article that appeared on the Associated Press new feed that basically said a lot of things about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers, how so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" 9CAM) is finding its way into the mainstream despite almost nonexistent evidence for the efficacy the vast majority of them, and how supplements are virtually unregulated. If the article had mentioned the extreme scientific and biological implausibility of nearly all of the non-herbal CAM therapies that are routinely promoted, it would have…
oracknows | June 8, 2009Here we go again.
As regular readers know, I've lamented long and loud the infiltration of unscientific "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM, or what Dr. RW dubbed "quackademic medicine, a term I very much like) into medical school curricula, academic medical centers, and postgraduate medical education. A while back, in particular, I got rather worked up over how the University of Maryland's respected Shock Trauma Center. But it wasn't just any woo. Rather, it was one of the absolute woo-iest of woos, namely reiki, which is nothing more than magical faith healing based on Eastern…
oracknows | June 6, 2009Dr. Jay is back.
You remember Dr. Jay (namely Dr. Jay "I'm not anti-vaccine but I give vaccines only 'reluctantly' and am convinced that they cause autism" Gordon), pediatrician to Evan, Jenny McCarthy's son and frequent apologist for the antivaccine movement in the media. Specifically, he was most unhappy over my posts about Dr. Bob "too many too soon" Sears and about a child who died of Hib. If you peruse the comments in those two posts, you will see him once again disparaging science, touting his own personal clinical experience over the science failing to find a link between vaccines and…
oracknows | June 5, 2009SETTING: A NONDESCRIPT CLINIC IN AUSTIN, TEXAS
TIME: AFTER DARK
It had been a long, hard day at the clinic. The man trudged to the back of the building and plopped himself down on a large, cushy leather office chair, causing it to spin around. He was fiftyish, but still boyish in appearance, possessed of a seemingly unflappable self-confidence. Even so, he was not happy.
Damn, I hate being here. He thought. I'd much rather be back in London than stuck in this hick state. At least Austin is about as good as it gets here. I suppose it could be worse; I could be in Arkansas.
He sighed. "Damn…
oracknows | June 4, 2009
Back in May many of us in the skeptical blogosphere were alarmed to learn of what British law blogger Jack of Kent termed "an astonishingly illiberal ruling" by Sir David Eady against science writer Simon Singh. Eady was the judge presiding over another bit of legal thuggery by practitioners whose feelings were hurt when Simon Singh called them out in print for their 'promotion of chiropractic to treat all sorts of conditions for which it is utterly useless, referring to the British Chiropractic Association as promoting "bogus" remedies. When I wrote about this case nearly a month ago, I…
oracknows | June 4, 2009I've warned time and time again what the price will be if the Jenny McCarthy and her fellow arrogantly ignorant band of vaccine "skeptics" continue to get more and more traction. So have many others. It is true that, for the moment, vaccination rates overall remain high in the U.S., but there are numerous troubling signs that the propaganda being spread by Generation Rescue and the anti-vaccine movement is having an effect, with outbreaks of vaccine-preventble diseases popping up in areas with high levels of "philosophical" exemptions. In such areas, vaccination rates can easily fall well…
oracknows | June 3, 2009Yesterday, I wrote a post about what fellow ScienceBlogger Isis would term "hot, hot science." As much as I love science like that, writing such posts is a lot of work and takes considerably longer than my run-of-the-mill bit of insolent brilliance. Often, after writing an analysis of a peer-reviewed paper like that, I need a bit of a break. No, not a break in writing, but a break in difficulty. To that end, I had seen David Kirby's latest bit of disingenuous goalpost shifting over on The Huffington Post, but damn if Steve Novella didn't beat me to it. I had thought of taking sloppy seconds,…
oracknows | June 1, 2009Last week I wrote a bit about what I've been tempted to call Oprah's War on Science but settled for the title of a documentary called The Oprah Effect. The reason, as I have mentioned before, is that arguably there is no single person who does more to promote pseudoscientific and dubious health practices than does Oprah Winfrey. I was happy to learn that more people are questioning Oprah's promotion of outright quackery than I recall ever having seen before.
It wasn't always so. Oprah Winfrey is an extremely powerful media figure, having been the host of the highest rated syndicated talk show…
oracknows | May 31, 2009Want to know how Jenny McCarthy, J.B. Handley, other anti-vaccine advocates, creationists, quacks, 9/11 Truthers, and cranks and pseudoscientists of all stripes manage to be heard when they have no science, evidence, reason, logic, or facts on their side?
Sadly, The Onion knows: Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!
At first, it looks as though the forces of reason can win:
Goddamn it, nothing's working! It's trapped us in our own unsubstantiated claims! We need to switch fundamentally unsound tactics. Hurry, throw up the straw man! Look, I think it's going for…
oracknows | May 29, 2009I don't much like Oprah Winfrey.
I know, I know, it's a huge surprise to anyone who reads this blog, but there you go. Over the last four years, I've had numerous reasons to be unhappy with her, mainly because, as savvy a media celebrity and businesswoman as she is, she has about as close to no critical thinking skills when it comes to science and medicine as I've ever seen. Arguably there is no single person in the world with more influence pushing woo than Oprah. Indeed, she puts Prince Charles to shame, and Kevin Trudeau's is a mere ant compared to the juggernaught that is Oprah's media…
oracknows | May 28, 2009Here's one of the stranger "alternative cancer cure" cases I've seen in a while. Basically, a man seems to think that a daily helping of his daughter's breast milk will cure his metastatic colon cancer:
When Tim Browne sits down to a bowl of corn flakes in the morning, he slurps up one unusual, and controversial, extra ingredient: his own daughter's breast milk.
He doesn't do it for the taste -- Browne initally said his daughter Georgia's breast millk tasted "not unpleasant, but slightly pungent" -- but for his health.
Nearly two years ago, the retired teacher and musician from Wiltshire,…
oracknows | May 28, 2009Today is a very good day indeed.
I say that because Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who ran away with his mother to avoid having to undergo chemotherapy ordered by a judge, who had found that his parents were engaging in medical neglect in not getting him effective treatment, and returned on Monday, will begin his course of chemotherapy today. I'm very happy to hear that Daniel and his parents have decided to stop fighting:
After Daniel and his mother returned to Minnesota this week, both his parents told a judge they will let Daniel undergo chemotherapy because…
oracknows | May 27, 2009I'm a bit envious of Dawn Crawford. Why am I envious? She has a badge of honor I have yet to obtain.
Jenny McCarthy has blocked her on Twitter.
Darn. I'm going to have to see if I can get Jenny to block me too.
oracknows | May 26, 2009Hot on the heels of yesterday's paper in Pediatrics showing that vaccine refusal elevates the risk of pertussis in a child by nearly 23-fold, a commentary in PLoS Biology asks what can be done to combat anti-vaccine misinformation. Entitled A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars, it's an interview with a professor of medical anthropology at UCSF named Sharon Kaufman, who took a 26 month hiatus from her usual work on aging and longevity to study the anti-vaccine movement from an anthropological perspective. Her observations in some way echo observations I've been making as a…
oracknows | May 25, 2009I've been writing a lot about the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who underwent one course of chemotherapy and then decided he wanted to pursue "alternative therapy" based on fear of chemotherapy and the faux Native American religion that his mother had taken up with. Ultimately, after a judge ordered Daniel's parents to make sure that Daniel received the chemotherapy and radiation therapy he needed, Daniel and his mother Colleen went on the lam last week and were last thought to be heading for Mexico and almost certain death.
That is, until sanity prevailed…