Quackery
oracknows | October 19, 2008Note: The following is a collaborative post between James (a.k.a. Dad of Cameron of Autism Street) and Orac. Feel free to tell which parts were written by whom.:-)
Jenny McCarthy's latest book, Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds, contains a foreword penned by "pediatrician to the stars' children", Dr. Jay Gordon. Dr. Gordon (or, as he often refers to himself, Dr. Jay), is the pediatrician for Jenny McCarthy's son Evan, whose autism McCarthy blames on vaccines and whom she has also claimed to have "cured" of autism with so-called "biomedical interventions. Dr…
oracknows | October 18, 2008There's not much to add here, other than Jenny McCarthy needs to be stopped. Stopping her is even more important than stopping Sylvia Browne. As vile as Sylvia Browne is, at least she doesn't endanger millions of children by self-righteously promoting antivaccinationist lies that have already started to lead to the return of formerly controlled vaccine-preventable diseases. Sylvia's just a run-of-the-mill scam artist, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Intentions like Jenny McCarthy's.
Also, here's a little something for a "friend" of the blog: A reader took the time to…
oracknows | October 17, 2008It's time.
Well, it's sort of time, anyway.
As you know, it's been over three months since I last indulged in my little Friday exercise known as Your Friday Dose of Woo. At the time it was because I couldn't get myself into the appropriately light-hearted but nonetheless just vicious enough frame of mind to do the exercise after we had to have our dog put to sleep. In retrospect, however, it was clear to me that the whole feature had been running on fumes for a while before that. It had become a bit stale and, I thought, could benefit from a hiatus. At the time, I hadn't planned for the…
oracknows | October 16, 2008I thought I had seen it all.
Ever since I first discovered the antivaccination movement that is utterly convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that mercury from the thimerosal preservative that was in many vaccines until the end of 2001 or, more recently, vaccines themselves cause autism, I've been amazed at the panoply of dubious ideas proposed about how vaccines might bring this about. There is, of course, the claim of neurotoxicity from mercury, even though the symptoms of mercury toxicity do not come close to matching those of autism. Then, of course, there is the related claim…
oracknows | October 14, 2008OK, I give up.
I hadn't planned on blogging about this because I thought I had already taken care of this woo before. Well, not exactly this woo, but a related woo of which this new issue is just a warmed over more woo-ified version. Indeed, I had even considered it as a candidate to be the first "victim" of a new, improved, resurrected version of Your Friday Dose of Woo (yes, I still do intend to resurrect it but haven't managed to find the time to give it the justice it deserves), but decided against using this particular form of woo because, well, it's quackery that kills. And that's a…
oracknows | October 12, 2008NOTE: This post, which is related to a discussion of Dr. Paul Offit's Book Autism's False Prophets, originally appeared over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club. However, now that the book club for this particular book has concluded, I am free to repost it here for those who may not have seen it and to archive it as one of my own posts. Besides, I know the antivaxers are more likely to see it here...
On Friday, while discussing what is perhaps the aspect of Autism's False Prophets that is at the same time the most important set of observations (namely, how the media and government miscommunicate…
oracknows | October 11, 2008NOTE: This post, which is related to a discussion of Dr. Paul Offit's Book Autism's False Prophets, originally appeared over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club. However, now that the book club for this particular book has concluded, I am free to repost it here for those who may not have seen it and to archive it as one of my own posts. Besides, I know the antivaxers are more likely to see it here...
One of the major points made by Dr. Offit in Autism's False Prophets is how badly the media deals with scientific issues and stories in which science is a major component. Indeed, he devotes two full…
oracknows | October 11, 2008NOTE: This review of Dr. Offit's book Autism's False Prophets originally appeared over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club. However, now that the book club for this particular book has concluded, I am free to repost it here for those who may not have seen it and to archive it as one of my own posts. Besides, I know the antivaxers are more likely to see it here...
Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste...
Well, not really. I might have one of the two. Or not.
Be that as it may, I'm Orac, and I blog regularly at Respectful Insolence. In the more than two and a half years I…
oracknows | October 10, 2008...Dr. John Kiely, a.k.a. EpiWonk, will school you otherwise. (I had to attend a function for work last night; so no new insolence for you right now. Maybe later. Hard as it is to believe, I do sometimes have to let my job interfere with my blogging. Fortunately, I've been meaning to plug Dr. Kiely's post since it came out.)
After telling the harrowing story of his brush with serious complications from the measles as a child, he sums up the current day know-nothing, "green our vaccines" antivaccination movement succinctly and accurately:
Meanwhile, the modern anti-vaccination movement, which…
oracknows | October 9, 2008Well that didn't take long, did it?
Three days ago, I described a study that I had noticed in the October 1 issue of Cancer Research that described an animal study that strongly suggested that vitamin C administered at sufficiently high doses may interfere with the action of multiple chemotherapeutic agents. You can read the link for full details of the study as discussed by yours truly. In fact, although I only blog sporadically about the exaggerated claims of advocates of vitamin C as a cancer cure, but when I do I like to think I hit the mark, starting two and a half years ago when I wrote…
oracknows | October 8, 2008Here we go again.
It seems just yesterday that I was casting a skeptical eye on yet another dubious acupuncture study. OK, it wasn't just yesterday, but it was less than two weeks ago when I discussed why a study that purported to show that acupuncture worked as well as drug therapy for hot flashes due to breast cancer therapy-induced menopause. Unfortunately, these days these sorts of dubious studies seem to be popping up fast and furious like Whac-A-Mole, so much so that I can't always keep up with them. So it is again, although this time it's acupressure, not acupuncture. Unfortunately,…
oracknows | October 7, 2008...it'll be because the flu vaccine poisoned me, of course!
That's right. Today I got my flu shot, complete with thimerosal and formaldehyde! I do put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. No word on whether there was any of the dreaded Polysorbate 80 in the vaccine, though. Oh, well. Maybe next time.
Also, while we're at it, my latest post over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club is up and ready for your perusal. Read it, enjoy it, trash it if you like. Just don't ignore it.
You know how much I hate it when my posts are ignored.
oracknows | October 6, 2008Sometimes I have to look for blog ideas, trolling through various alternative medicine sites, medical news sites, or science news feeds or my medical and science journals. Sometimes ideas fall on me seemingly out of the blue. This is one of the latter situations. This time around, as I do twice a month I was perusing the very latest issue of Cancer Research, hot off the presses October 1. As I did so, it didn't take me long to come across an article from the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia entitled Vitamin C Antagonizes the…
oracknows | October 6, 2008As you may remember, the evening after the Hollywood face of the antivaccine P.R. machine Jenny McCarthy was scheduled to take part in a web chat. At the time, I suggested sending questions in to the Oprah website, to see if any would get through. I'm sure there was some serious screening and vetting of possible questions; so I suggested trying to word them in such a way as to indicate Jenny's ignorance without triggering the censors. Apparently never was heard a discouraging word in the web chat (big surprise there), but apparently one rather clever wag did manage to get a question through…
oracknows | October 4, 2008Unfortunately, I'm going to be ensconced in my Sanctum Sanctorum most of the day, pounding out text far less fun than the text I like to pound out for Respectful Insolence. However, I have to admit that this video sums up the attitude behind a whole lot of woo that I like to apply a skeptical deconstruction to--with music!
oracknows | October 3, 2008...at The ScienceBlogs Book Club has been posted. Go forth and enjoy. As always for these Book Club Posts, no comments are allowed here. Got a response? Hate my guts? Think I'm in the pocket of Big Pharma, Big Government, and the Illuminati, too? At least for this post, say it over there!
oracknows | October 2, 2008After having posted about Jenny McCarthy, my brain hurt so much from the neuron-apoptosing idiocy that she always delivers that I decided I needed to move on to something that wouldn't assault my reason and quite so much. So I headed on over to that uber-repository of quackery and paranoid conspiracy theories, Mike Adam's Natural News.
It's true. Jenny is so dumb that Mike Adams looks intelligent by comparison, and that's saying a lot. Well, not really. In actuality, they're both black holes of negative intelligence, sucking all knowledge and science out of whatever environment self they land…
oracknows | October 1, 2008I guess that since my resistance failed, and I couldn't resist posting yesterday about the burning stupid that is Jenny McCarthy and her arrogance of ignorance in claiming that vaccines caused her son's autism and her campaigning to "Green Our Vaccines" (in reality, a smokescreen to hide her antivaccinationism), I thought why not go whole hog and get it out of my system? Let's just take in a concentrated dose, as the more Jenny talks the more she discredits the antivaccine movement among anyone with a lick of scientific literacy:
Embedded video from CNN Video
Jenny's on fire with stupid!…
oracknows | October 1, 2008...has been posted over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club.
Head on over. As will be the case for all my posts at the Book Club, please leave comments there, not here. Thanks.
oracknows | October 1, 2008Readers may be wondering why I haven't written about Jenny McCarthy's latest brain dead outburst against Amanda Peet. (Actually, brain dead is too kind a description of it, given that Jenny's retort in essence boils down to her having an "angry mob" on her side making Amanda "completely wrong.") It's because I decided to try to resist for once in my life. And I was doing really good at it, too, even though several readers sent me links to various stories about Jenny McCarthy's outburst. Still, I resisted. Even after antivaccinationist financier J. B. Handley wrote a post demanding of Amanda…