Quackery
oracknows | February 3, 2009Ten months ago, I thought I was joking. I really did.
Regular readers may (or may not) remember back in March, when, in one of my usual flights of fancy, I decided that I could write a short fictional interlude, a combat scene. True, I didn't do it because I wanted actually to write a fictional story (although I have always wondered if I could write decent short stories or a novel if I put my mind to it). Rather, I did it to make a point, and argument, a reductio ad absurdum, if you will, of a program in the Air Force to bring "battlefield acupuncture" to the our fighting men and women in the…
oracknows | February 2, 2009I'm pretty sure that I've mentioned this before at least a couple of times, but I am an alumnus of the University of Michigan twice over. I completed a B.S. in Chemistry with Honors there and then I stayed on to do obtain my M.D. Several of my longtime friendships were forged or solidified during those years. Consequently, I still care about the place. That's why it distresses me when I see my alma mater shoots itself in the foot. Now, I'll grant you that what I'm about to discuss probably doesn't bother me as much as the plight of the Michigan Wolverines bothers me, given that never before…
oracknows | February 2, 2009I love Tim Minchin.
I also totally understand where he's coming from when it comes to confronting woo, though, as I've described here. In any case, see Tim in action (parts may be NSFW due to profanity):
Enjoy, as I'm running a bit late in producing my usual content for Monday. Fear not, it's coming later today!
oracknows | January 30, 2009
Sometimes I come across something so bizarre, so utterly wrong, that my mind reels in confusion and amazement, not to mention horror, that anyone can actually think or write something something like it. In fact, for a moment I considered offering up this one bit of horrifically inspired craziness up as an installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo, but I decided against it. The reason, I'm afraid, is the same reason that I've considered some bits of woo previously for this "honor" but then ultimately declined and covered them as normal posts, dripping with my usual brand of Respectful and not-…
oracknows | January 29, 2009I think my title says it all: Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Can we?
The reason I ask this question is because yet another large meta-analysis has been released that is entirely consistent with the hypothesis that acupuncture is a placebo. Because I've written about so many of these sorts of studies over the last year or two that I really had a hard time mustering up the will to write about one more. But I got in pretty late last night and therefore knew I could handle this in a reasonably expeditious fashion. Besides, it is a fairly…
oracknows | January 28, 2009...it smells like...fisking.
In this case, it's a fisking of a particularly annoyingly self-righteous and scientifically ignorant antivaccinationist by a medical student. The annoying drinker of the "vaccines cause autism" Kool Aid is Ginger Taylor. The medical student is Adina Cappell. The slapdown is utterly comprehensive, methodical, and ruthless, pummeling Ginger's panoply of pseudoscience, logical fallacies, defenses of Jenny McCarthy, and conspiracy mongering under a barrage of science, reason, and fact, leaving nothing but smoldering ruins of antivaccinationist misinformation.
Even…
oracknows | January 27, 2009It looks like I've been sucked into another streak again.
Regular readers know that examining the claims of the antivaccine movement with skepticism, science, and critical thinking has been a theme of this blog from the very beginning. If there's one thing I've learned over the last four years, it's that vaccine news seems to come in streaks. Often weeks will pass without much, and, because the antivaccine wingnuttery over at, for example, The Huffington Post and Age of Autism is such a constant that it blurs into background noise, provoking my attention only when someone really brings the…
oracknows | January 26, 2009Remember the quack-friendly scammer Kevin Trudeau? Remember his book Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You To Know About? Back during the summer, he was fined $5 million and ordered not to produce or publish infomercials for products in which he had an interest. Given the huge profits he made from Natural Cures and his followup The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You to Know About, unfortunately, $5 million was nothing more than the cost of doing business. It didn't do one thing to deter Trudeau.
Maybe this will:
A federal judge has ordered infomercial marketer Kevin Trudeau to pay more than…
oracknows | January 26, 2009Beginning on Friday after my post expressing amazement at something as rare as a 70° F temperature in January (at least around my neck of the woods), namely an actual provaccine article in the Huffington Post, a number of you began sending me links to a story that I find most disturbing, a mini-tsunami that continued all weekend. In fact, it's so disturbing that I kept procrastinating all weekend until I wasn't even sure I was going to write about it at all. But the comments kept coming, and I realized once again that, once one gains a reputation as a go-to blogger about a certain topic,…
oracknows | January 23, 2009When it comes to science, I've always detested The Huffington Post.
Nearly four years ago, when Arianna Huffington's vanity group political blog went live, I was the first one to notice a most disturbing trend about it. As far as I knew at the time (or know now), I was the only one to have noticed that The Huffington Post had become a hotbed of antivaccine propaganda a mere three weeks after its launch. It was home to David Kirby, author of that paean to the mercury militia Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic, A Medical Controversy and now antivaccine blogger on both…
oracknows | January 22, 2009Being involved in clinical research makes me aware of the ethical quandaries that can arise. Fortunately for me, for the most part my studies are straightforward and don't provoke much in the way of angst over whether what I am doing is ethical or whether I'm approaching a line I shouldn't approach or crossing a line I shouldn't cross. However, there's lots of research that flirts with the unethical and sometimes even crosses the line. Institutional review boards are there to oversee the ethics of clinical trials and protect the human subjects who participate in them, but they don't always…
oracknows | January 21, 2009Regular readers here know that one of the themes of this blog is both a lament over the infiltration of quackademic medicine and a call to arms to fight it with science- and evidence-based medicine. However, to achieve this end, it won't be enough for middle-aged farts like myself to take up the banner. We need to influence the next generation of doctors. In order to provide our patients with the best care, we need to inculcate the knowledge of science and how to apply it to medical questions into the next generation. In short, we need to win over residents and medical students.
Medical…
oracknows | January 21, 2009I got home from work rather late last night; so for once I'll spare you my typical Orac-ian level of logorrhea today. Yes, I know how much the ravening hordes of my fans thirst for every bit of wisdom that flows from my keyboard to Seed Magazine's servers and from there to the world, but fear not. I didn't say I wouldn't quench that thirst. I just won't be taking as long as usual. Maybe a couple of quickies instead of the epic post.
My vastly inflated sense of self-importance, bloated beyond all reasonable sense of scale, aside, if there's one thing I've taken an interest in and written about…
oracknows | January 19, 2009I almost feel sorry for homeopathy Jeremy Sherr. Almost. You see, he is busily learning a lesson that HIV/AIDS denialist Celia Farber learned a couple of weeks ago, namely that, unlike the fictional nation of Oceania in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, memory holes do not work very well in the Internet age.
I'll backtrack a bit and explain. Last week, several readers sent me reports about a homeopath named Jeremy Sherr, who apparently in November went to Tanzania in Africa and has been busted by the skeptical blogosphere for proposing on his blog Jeremy's Journal from Africa completely…
oracknows | January 16, 2009I hate to see this. I really do.
I really hate it to see people who think they're doing a good thing, who think they're raising money for a worthy charity, totally clueless that what they are doing is supporting the rankest pseudoscience and quackery. Here's an example from my hometown of Detroit. It's a story about a woman who's going to raise money for what she thinks is autism awareness and research at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this coming week:
When it comes to dressing for the North American International Auto Show Charity Preview, attendee Val McFarland is…
oracknows | January 16, 2009I hate to finish up the week on a bit of a downer, but unfortunately this week I really wasn't in the mood to do justice to Your Friday Dose of Woo, even though I have at least a couple of potential targets--I mean subjects--to cover for my (hopefully) fun little Friday exercise. I was gearing up to try anyway, when I saw something in my e-mail that saddened me greatly. (More on that in a moment.) I even thought of trying to pull off a post on a peer-reviewed article, even though it was pretty late when I got home. However, due to the careful reading and examination of data required, those…
oracknows | January 15, 2009P.Z. Myers turned me on to a phenomenal proposal at Change.gov, the website of President-Elect Barack Obama's transition team:
Defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine:
Here's a way to increase the available funding to NIH without increasing the NIH budget: halt funding to NCCAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This Center was created not by scientists, who never thought it was a good idea, but by Congress, and specifically by just two Congressmen in the 1990's who believed in particular "alternative" (but scientifically dubious)…
oracknows | January 15, 2009My dear readers, I beg your indulgence for the moment.
I had been planning on doing something a bit more serious than what I've been up to lately. Believe it or not, NaturalNews.com pointed me to a study that's actually pretty interesting. It even challenges to some extend existing results. Of course, Mike Adams' minion's interpretation of the study was so wrong as to be not even wrong, as they say (so what else is new?). But therein lies the entertainment value with the educational value.
Sometimes, however, something happens, and a followup to something I've written before is demanded. It…
oracknows | January 14, 2009I find it hard to believe that we're already two weeks into 2009. The older I get and the longer I've been blogging, it seems, the faster time files. It's gotten so bad that it's not at all infrequent that I remember a post that I've written, go searching for it, and end up amazed that it's several months or even a couple of years old. In any case, 2009 has gotten off to a pretty decent start, with posts about HIV/AIDS denialism, the probable selection of Dr. Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General, a followup on Tong Ren, Holocaust denial, and the "bait and switch" of Deepak Chopra and "alternative…
oracknows | January 13, 2009Last week, I did multiple posts about the death of HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore of what for all the world looked like an HIV-related pneumonia, the excuses HIV/AIDS denialists made to try to persuade people that it wasn't AIDS, and the attempted coverup of damning posts. In the past, I've also taken a certain comedian by the name of Bill Maher to task for his antivaccine views, germ theory denialism, and embrace of detoxification quackery and conspiracy mongering about big pharma.
I should have known that wasn't all. I should have realized that he would be sympathetic to HIV/AIDS…