Quackery
oracknows | August 26, 2008Yesterday, I was annoyed by a particularly vile article by quackery promoter supreme Mike Adams claiming that Christina Applegate didn't need a bilateral mastectomy and could have "cured" herself of cancer with "natural" methods. Indeed, my contempt for Mike Adams knows no bounds, given that he is the purveyor of a seemingly never-ending stream of antiscience and quackery, much of it directed at cancer patients, who if they follow Adams' "advice" could very well miss their best chance at treating their cancer and thereby wind up dead. Indeed, so great is the amount of quackery emanating from…
oracknows | August 25, 2008This is getting to be nauseatingly frequent.
As my blog bud Mark Hoofnagle pointed out, the hard-core "alternative medicine" mavens, in particular that despicable promoter of quackery and distrust of scientific medicine who runs one of the two or three largest repositories of antiscience and quackery in existence, Mike Adams, seem to have decided that a lovely new tactic would be to descend upon every celebrity death or battle with serious disease, ghoul-like, and blame their deaths or suffering on conventional medicine rather than disease. Both PalMD and I noted this particularly vile tactic…
oracknows | August 22, 2008Regarding the recent antivaccinationist-fueled outbreak of measles reported yesterday, quoth J. B. Handley, founder of Generation Rescue, now arguably the most prominent antivaccine activist group in the U.S., given that its coffers are filled with money from celebrity and pro wrestling fundraisers:
Autism and antivaccines advocates are unapologetic about the return of measles.
"Most parents I know will take measles over autism," said J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a parent-led organization that contends that autism is a treatable condition caused by vaccines.
Except that…
oracknows | August 21, 2008I realize that I've thanked Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield before for giving the U.S. the gift of a measles resurgence. Originally, when I started this sarcastic little exercise, I assumed that it would be 5-10 years before we in the States caught up with the level of endemic measles that has been resurgent in the U.K. in the decade since Andrew Wakefield published his shoddy, fraudulent, pseudoscientific, litigation-driven article in The Lancet claiming that the MMR vaccine was responsible for "autistic enterocolitis," leading to an anti-MMR hysteria that drove down vaccination rates…
oracknows | August 20, 2008
My Academic Woo Aggregator has become even more out of date. You remember my Academic Woo Aggregator, don't you? It's my list of medical schools and major academic medical centers in North America that have adopted what Dr. R.W. once so famously dubbed "quackademic medicine" in that they've created divsions, centers, or departments of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM), in which pseudoscientific or mystical woo is "integrated" with scientific medicine in the mistaken belief that it will somehow improve patient care. Whether it's for chasing money…
oracknows | August 18, 2008I've written about the ridiculousness of the Kinoki Detox Footpads before. While on the way home from work today, I happened to be listening to NPR, and--wonder of wonders!--I came across a skeptical story about the Kinoki Footpads. In the story, the reporter, Sarah Varney, took used footpads to a laboratory to have them tested. Surprise, surprise! There was no significant difference between the used and unused pads in chemical content, nor was there any evidence of elevated heavy metal content of the "used" pads. She then interviewed a doctor who explained just how ridiculous the concept of…
oracknows | August 18, 2008In complaining about the infiltration of pseudoscience in the form of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) into academic medicine, as I have many times, I've made the observation that three common modalities appear to function as "gateway woo, if you will, in that they are the tip of the wedge (not unlike the wedge strategy for "intelligent design" creationism, actually) that slip into any defect or crack it can find and widen it, allowing entrance of more hard core woo like homeopathy behind them.
All of these modalities fall under the rubric of "energy healing" in that the…
oracknows | August 15, 2008I was called upon once before, and now I'm called upon again. Jenny McCarthy needs me:
From: "Jenny McCarthy" volunteer@generationrescue.org
Reply-to: volunteer@generationrescue.org
To: orac@scienceblogs.com
Date: Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 11:26 AM
Subject: News From Jenny McCarthy
Become a Rescue Angel Today!
Dear Orac,
It's Jenny!
Please join my team and help other families!
I'm about to go on tour to promote my new book, Mother Warriors, which hits the bookstores everywhere, September 23rd (38 days from now!). I will also be on all the major talk shows showing the world that autism is…
oracknows | August 15, 2008I don't know who Kent Sepkowitz is other than that he he's an infectious disease specialist in New York and that he writes for Slate. I also know he's written about penis enlargement, his dislike of magazines' "best doctor" lists (a sentiment with which I can agree, actually), and that he has suggested that Americans should "eat more excrement." What I didn't know is that he was capable of slinging said excrement around (at least, the excrement left over after Americans eat more of it, I suppose), specifically slinging excrement about so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)…
oracknows | August 14, 2008It looks as though at least a couple of my readers have taken to heart my suggestion that, if the pro-CAM, "no skeptics need apply" new wikipedia known as Wiki4CAM won't allow any scientific evidence to be posted within its pages if it does not support the CAM therapy being discussed, then perhaps we should go all Sokal on it and post the most outlandish forms of CAM we can think of in order to see whether any of the editors at Wiki4CAM actually notices, and if anyone does how long it takes.
Thus far, we have two skeptics who have taken up the challenge, one choosing a more subtle--shall we…
oracknows | August 11, 2008Seen in a bookstore in the Delta terminal at LaGuardia:
It makes perfect sense. What's left after fleecing millions of gullible readers selling books about "alternative" medicine and secret cures "they" don't want you to know about? Fleecing millions of gullible readers by selling books rife financial scams, of course. (I wonder how many pyramid schemes--excuse me, multilevel marketing investment opportunites"--are within this new book.) Of course, Kevin Trudeau definitely knows about financial scams. After all, he did spend time in jail for swindling banks and another for bilking his…
oracknows | August 11, 2008While I was away over the weekend, a reader made me aware of a new development in the world of "alternative"--excuse me, "complementary and alternative"--medicine (a.k.a. CAM). I suppose I should have seen this coming. In retrospect, given the proliferation of wikis of seemingly every shape and for seemingly every purpose, it was inevitable that someone, somewhere would put together a wiki for CAM, known as the Wiki4CAM: Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Encyclopedia.
My first thought was that maybe I should register. Certainly I could edit some articles, although, despite what…
oracknows | August 7, 2008...to ask über-quack Hulda Clark, the woman who disagrees with Dr. Simoncini in that she thinks that all cancer is caused by an intestinal fluke and that she can cure it by "zapping" it with a chintzy device she calls a "Zapper" that looks a lot like a Scientology E-meter, any question you want. She's going to be broadcasting her quackery all over the intertubes tonight on Patrick Timpone's One Radio Network at 7 PM CDT:
Thursday, August 7, 7-8 PM Talk to the Legendary Dr. Hulda Clark
Dr. Clark has a clinic in Mexico and claims a high success rate with Cancer patients and uses the word "…
oracknows | August 7, 2008I don't much like Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com (formerly NewsTarget.com). Indeed, I haven't yet been able to find a more blatant purveyor of the worst kind of quackery and paranoid anti-physician and anti-medicine conspiracy theories anywhere on the Internet, with the possible exception of Whale.to. However, Whale.to is so utterly, outrageously, incoherently full of not just quackery but paranoid New World Order conspiracy theories and other paranormal silliness that any but the most deluded can easily see it for what it is with just a cursory reading of a few of its many, many pages. It's…
oracknows | August 5, 2008Bizarrely enough, Suzanne Somers has been a common topic of discussion on this blog since the very beginning. Indeed, in one of my earliest substantive posts, way back in December 2004 when I had just started this blog on Blogger, I used her as an example of how misleading breast cancer testimonials can be. At the time, I only knew Somers as a breast cancer survivor who had decided to turn to "alternative" therapy. What she really meant was that she had undergone surgery and radiation but had decided not to undergo chemotherapy, opting instead for mistletoe extract
I also explained at the…
oracknows | August 4, 2008I've lamented time and time again how much woo has managed to infiltrate academic medicine, even to the point where prestigious medical schools such as Harvard and Yale have fallen under its sway. I've even gone so far as to lament that resistance is futile when it comes to the rising tide of woo threatening to wash over academic medicine, although lately I've been in a more pugnacious mood.
But what good is a pugnacious mood when denialist pseudoscience starts popping up credulously reported in news sources tailored for physicians and other health care professionals? That's exactly what…
oracknows | August 1, 2008Remember how on Monday I posted a dissection of some truly execrable reporting on vaccines and potential conflicts of interest (COIs) by Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News that aired one week ago today? As you may recall, my main point was that Attkisson's reporting was lazy, describing nothing that couldn't be found from public sources, and biased in that it intentionally used inflammatory language in order to bias the reader/audience against Dr. Paul Offit and the American Academy of Pediatrics right off the bat before even describing the supposed COI. I further made the point that it's rather…
oracknows | July 30, 2008With all the negativity around this blog lately, thanks to the continued moronic antics of the anti-vaccine contingent, which have irritated me more than they do usually, so much so that I can't recall a time since Jenny McCarthy's "Green Our Vaccine" anti-vaccination-fest nearly two months ago that they've been so flagrant in their lies, I thought it was time for some good news for a change. Fortunately, by way of the latest issue of The Lancet, some good news showed up in the form of a study. This study, reported late last week by the Antiretroviral Therapy Cohort Collaboration, a…
oracknows | July 28, 2008You know, I think I've found a bride for Steve Wilson.
You remember Steve Wilson, don't you? He's the local "investigative reporter" in my hometown who recently did a truly awful "report" (it actually makes me cringe to call it a "report," but I couldn't think of anything else to call it) a couple of weeks ago, in which he regurgitated just about every anti-vaccine talking point about mercury and thimerosal there is out there. I hadn't seen anything like it, ever (at least not that I can recall). So bad was it that I feared the hyperconcentrated stupid might lower my blog bud PalMD's IQ by a…
oracknows | July 23, 2008Enough with Radovan Karadzic, already!
I know schadenfreude can be a fun thing. I've even indulged in it myself from time to time. I also know that Radovan Karadzic was a very, very bad man who engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Balkans wars of the early and mid-1990s. My interest in the Holocaust and Holocaust denial makes it hard not to see the parallels between Karadzic and what Hitler wanted to do.
So, wonder all the people who have forwarded me links to stories revealing that Karadzic had been practicing alternative medicine while he was on the lam all these years, why have…