Quackery
oracknows | October 1, 2008Just a quick announcement here:
The ScienceBlogs Book Club is back up and running, and this time the book under discussion is the latest by that Dark Lord of Vaccination himself, that Darth Vader to the antivaccinationist Luke Skywalker, otherwise known as Satan Incarnate to Jenny McCarthy, J.B. Handley, Andrew Wakefield, Dan Olmsted, and the crew of antivaccinationists spreading misinformation and endangering public health and promoting an amazing panoply of quackery to "cure" autism, Dr. Paul Offit. The book under discussion is Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the…
oracknows | October 1, 2008When I first started blogging, I liked to refer to myself as a booster of evidence-based medicine (EBM). These days, I'm not nearly as likely to refer to myself this way. It's not because I've become a woo-meister of course. Even a cursory reading of this blog would show that that is most definitely not the case.
So what's changed? Basically, I've come to the realization that EBM is an imperfect tool. Don't get me wrong, EBM goes a long way towards systematizing how we approach clinical data, but there's one huge flaw in it. (I can just see a quack somewhere quote-mining that sentence: "Orac…
oracknows | September 30, 2008Yesterday's post was a result of the feeling that I had been getting too snarky for too long a time without doing some serious science or medical blogging. Not that there's anything wrong with being snarky, but a continuous diet of snark eventually gets dull--and not just to readers. However, science blogging is hard. Posts like that take a lot of work (which is why I have a propensity to write such posts over the weekend and post them on Monday). After I do a serious, thoughtful post like that, sometimes I just need a diversion. Sometimes I need to examine something that allows me to deliver…
oracknows | September 23, 2008Thanks to our "friends" at the Age of Autism, I've learned something interesting.
I knew that antivaccinationist "mother warrior" and Indigo Child Supreme Jenny McCarthy was slated to appear tomorrow, September 24, on the television show that arguably serves as the most powerful and pervasive promoter of woo, magical thinking, and dubious health advice in the world, The Oprah Winfrey Show. I hadn't actually planned on watching it (I'm never home when it's on anyway), and setting the DVR to record it for later viewing seems more than I'm willing to do to expose my brain to the neuron-…
oracknows | September 22, 2008Every blogger encounters a post that he wishe he or she had written. Here's one such time, as Prometheus schools us on how alternative practitioners manage to be so persuasive and convincing:
How they do the voodoo that they do so well - Part 1
How they do the voodoo that they do so well - Part 2
oracknows | September 19, 2008As a cancer surgeon, I maintain a particularly intense contempt for peddlers of cancer quackery. Although I've been fortunate enough not to have had to see the end results of it more than a handful of times in my career, women with bleeding, stinking, fungating tumors with widespread metastases that could have been treated if they hadn't decided upon woo rather than good old-fashioned surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, I've become aware of enough such cases and seen the dishonest marketing of quackery enough to drive me to maintain this blog and undertake other activities to promote…
oracknows | September 18, 2008I feel a bit bad this week.
You see, since Tuesday I've been pretty much wallowing in some of the most outrageous woo, antiscience, and abuses of logic and reason I've ever come across, courtesy of the merry band of clueless antivaccinationists over at Age of Autism. I had thought that I should try to do a serious science post for today. But I got back from work too late, and those sorts of posts are a lot more work than the usual run-of-the-mill post. There's all that reading, analysis, and sometimes looking up of references. True, they're intellectually satisfying, but I can't do them every…
oracknows | September 17, 2008Well, well, well, well.
Sometimes science and ethics do win out after all:
CHICAGO (AP) -- A government agency has dropped plans for a study of a controversial treatment for autism that critics had called an unethical experiment on children.
The National Institute of Mental Health said in a statement Wednesday that the study of the treatment -- called chelation -- has been abandoned. The agency decided the money would be better used testing other potential therapies for autism and related disorders, the statement said.
The study had been on hold because of safety concerns after another study…
oracknows | September 17, 2008Forgive me, dear readers.
I realize that I've already subjected you once to the contagious supernova of stupidity that is an Olmsted on Autism blog post. I broke my usual rule about not directly linking to the crank blog Age of Autism unless there is a compelling need. One reason is that I hate to drive traffic there, Even though I do always make sure to use a rel="nofollow" tag whenever I link to AoA or any other blog whose Google ranking I don't want to contribute to, increasing AoA's traffic risks letting its "management" (such as it is) charge higher rates for advertising for the…
oracknows | September 16, 2008Dr. Paul Offit's book Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure has hit the bookstores, and, as predicted, the mercury militia is going into a frenzy of spin and smear. As is usual, because they have no science to support their viewpoint, they are reduced to extended ad hominem attacks. For example, the clueless wonder of a reporter who couldn't find the Clinic for Special Children and the autistic children treated there but nonetheless confidently exclaimed that he couldn't find any autistic Amish children, goes for a full frontal assault in a little…
oracknows | September 15, 2008One of the aspects of blogging that I've come to like is the ability to follow a story's evolution over the long term and to comment on new developments as they come along. If you're good at blogging, you can take that story and make it your own, adding it to your list of "signature" issues for which you become known and about which people come to you for commentary as new developments arise. Indeed, now that the fourth anniversary of the start of this blog is fast approaching (December 11, in case you don't remember!), I can look back and see a number of issues that I've done this with,…
oracknows | September 14, 2008...sometimes the good guys win.
Congratulations to Ben Goldacre for taking on the supplement quack Matthias Rath and prevailing. That he did it even in the notoriously plaintiff-friendly U.K. court system is even better. Indeed, The Guardian also deserves kudos for supporting Ben in this.
This case could be as momentous in terms of its implications for going after health fraud in the U.K. as the David Irving case was in terms of Holocaust denial. No, I am not calling Rath a neo-Nazi or Holocaust denier. There is no evidence, at least as far as I'm aware, that he subscribes to such vile views…
oracknows | September 12, 2008Even after over three years at this, I still find it amazing that as many people read my verbal meanderings as in fact do. In fact, I still can't believe that I'm one of the more popular medical bloggers out there. True, I'll probably never approach the traffic and readership of the huge political blogs or of our very own P.Z. Myers (who has at least ten times my traffic), but I appear to have become a fixture in the medical and scientific blogosphere.
Even more amazingly (to me, at least), I appear to have developed a bit of influence. I know it's hard to believe, but I was forced to accept…
oracknows | September 10, 2008I hate postmodernism.
Well, not exactly postmodernism per se, but I hate it when pseudoscientists and purveyors of dubious "alternative" medicine treatments invoke bizarre postmodernist-sounding arguments to attack science or, in the case of medicine, science- and evidence-based medicine. Usually these attacks involve a claim that science is nothing more than one other "narrative" among many others, a "narrative" that isn't necessarily any more valid than any other. Even worse, these sorts of arguments often claim that science (or, in this case, evidence-based medicine) is nothing more than a…
oracknows | September 9, 2008Well, here's a rare bit of good news in the endless tedium that has become the U.S. election. It appears that Barack Obama has ticked off the antivaccine contingent. I know, I know, I said I would try to lay off this topic for a few days, but this is just too amusing. Apparently, he's gone a long way towards redeeming himself for his previous gaffe when it came to vaccines and autism, and the antivaccine zealots over at Age of Autism are all in a tizzy over it:
Last Friday evening, September 5, 2008, I had the opportunity to ask Senator Barack Obama about childhood vaccine safety/choice. His…
oracknows | September 5, 2008I've railed on more than one occasion about how much I detest science by press release. For one thing, it bypasses the peer review process and reports results directly to the public, which to me is a strike against any study. Indeed, releasing results by press release or using a press release to tout a study before it's even published is, as far as I'm concerned, quite dubious, and when I see it I'm automatically way more suspicious of whether the study represents good (or even OK) science.
One form of science by press release that can be a bit more subtle than, say, the cold fusion guys…
oracknows | September 3, 2008This is getting to be monotonous, but it's a monotony that I like, as should anyone who supports scientific medicine and hates the resurgence of infectious diseases that antivaccinationists have been causing of late with their fearmongering about vaccines that frightens parents into refusing to vaccinate their children. It's the drumbeat of studies, seemingly coming out every few months, that fail to find even a whiff of a link or correlation between vaccines, thimerosal-containing or otherwise, and autism. You'd think that the pseudoscientists who are so utterly convinced that it absolutely…
oracknows | September 3, 2008Some people should keep their "gut feelings" to themselves.
You know the type: People who have no knowledge about a topic or, even worse, just enough knowledge to sound as if they have a clue about it to people who don't have a clue but who are at the same time easily spotted as utterly and completely clueless by people who do have a clue. These people often think they've discovered something that scientists, in all their blindness have missed, and have a burning urge to share their "gut feeling" about what they think they have discovered as though it's some revelation, a bolt out of the blue…
oracknows | August 31, 2008As my fellow Americans (ack! I'm sounding like a politician!) know, this happens to be a holiday weekend in the States, Monday being Labor Day. Given that, I'm taking it easy blogging until Tuesday, given that most people (in the U.S. at least) are probably out taking advantage of the opportunity that what is traditionally considered the last weekend of the summer vacation season affords. Me and my wife, we're taking advantage of this three day weekend to do somthing truly fun: To finally put our basement in order. (There's still a ton of stuff down there from when we moved in.) Woo-hoo!
In…
oracknows | August 29, 2008I hesitated about whether to post this, knowing how many antivaccine activists read this blog, which is why I didn't post it yesterday. Still, I think this might be of sufficient interest to my readers that I thought I'd announce it, just with relatively short notice.
It turns out that today's Science Friday with Ira Flatow features a discussion of childhood vaccines, complete with an appearance by a man whom antivaccinationists consider the Dark Lord of Vaccination himself, Dr. Paul Offit. It's on at 2 PM, and I'm told that Dr. Offit will be in the 2:20 to 2:40 PM segment, but I generally…