Quackery
oracknows | June 30, 2008
"I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward, you will service us." - Locutus of Borg.
"Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile...Your culture will adapt to service ours." -- The Borg.
I'm a bit depressed these days.
Maybe a better term for it would be pessimistic, as I'm not really depressed about the state of my life per se. More precisely, I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic about the state of science- and evidence-based medicine in this country. What brought this pessimism to the forefront was last Thursday's post, which…
oracknows | June 28, 2008Apparently there's a chiropracter named Billy Sticker running for President. His platform:
My platform:
To increase your patient count by 200% during my first term
To increase your income by 200%
Pass legislation designating Chiropractic the Official Health Care of America
Reduce our dependency on pharmaceuticals (because Chiropractic would be the official health care!)
He even has his own video coverage:
Say it ain't so! A woo-meister for President. That'd be a step down even from our current President! It's even worse than that, though. He's apparently a guy who sells marketing…
oracknows | June 27, 2008I realize that I've been mighty hard on Jenny McCarthy these last several months. I've made fun of her for her idiocy, her arrogance of ignorance, and her antivaccination lunacy, not to mention her utter ignorance of science, and, yes, I've been rather vicious at times. However, she richly deserved it. Indeed, I argue that in fact my reaction was actually mild in comparison to the sheer lunacy that she regularly spews and the threat to public health her ignorant antivaccinationist activism represents.
But it's Friday, and that means it's fun day. That means it's time for an excursion into…
oracknows | June 26, 2008A few months ago, I wrote a post lamenting how science- and evidence-based medicine has lost the linguistic high ground to the woo peddlers, those who have "rebranded" quackery first into "alternative" medicine, then into "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), and more recently into "integrative" medicine (as though "integrating" antiscience and pseudoscience into effective, science-based medicine somehow adds anything of value to medicine) and discussing strategies for reclaiming it.
Now, I've found out how CAM promoters pulled it off. Dr. Wallace Sampson has the scoop and dishes it…
oracknows | June 25, 2008It's rare that the mainstream media gets it right about vaccines and autism, and when they do I feel obligated to point it out. Such is the case with Sam Wang's article The Autism Myth Lives On. It's well worth reading, even though it's a couple of months old. (How I missed it when it first appeared, I don't know.) Wang even nails some of the reasons why this myth persists:
Although her [Jenny McCarthy's] concept of evidence is flawed, I don't blame her. The error highlights how our brains are wired to think. Like the authors of the 1998 study, she concluded that two events happening around…
oracknows | June 24, 2008Remember the case of Clifford Shoemaker, lawyer for the antivaccinationist mercury militia who tried to subpoena Kathleen Seidel under incredibly dubious legal reasoning in order to harass and intimidate her? Remember how the subpoena was quashed?
One word: Sanctioned!
Woo-hoo!
Quoth Judge James R. Muirhead:
Clifford J. Shoemaker's action is an abuse of legal process, a waste of judicial resources and an unnecessary waste of the time and expense to the purported deponent.
The Clerk of Court is directed to forward a certified copy of this order, the motion to quash, the show cause order, and…
oracknows | June 22, 2008I could resist a brief mention of this. Remember yesterday's post, when I discussed how EpiWonk had deconstructed and demolished David Kirby's latest mangling of epidemiology and willful misreading of government reports? Apparently it had an effect. It would appear that Mr. Kirby may actually have read it and taken it to heart. (Either that, or his capable of shame after all.) How do I know? He's made major modifications of his original post and reposted them.
Out with the old (including the old title): CDC: Vaccine Study Design "Uninformative and Potentially Misleading"
In with the new (…
oracknows | June 21, 2008At this stage of the game, I almost feel sorry for David Kirby.
Think about it. He's made his name and what little fame he has (which isn't much outside of the tinhat crowd that thinks the guv'mint is intentionally poisoning their children with vaccines to make them all autistic) almost entirely on the basis of one book published over three years ago, Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy. Of course, the question of whether mercury from the thimerosal preservative that used to be in vaccines, or vaccines themselves, cause autism has not been a…
oracknows | June 20, 2008...Orac might be in trouble:
(Click for the full comic.)
I wonder if I should hire a guard.
Actually, I think reading Respectful Insolence⢠might do Jenny McCarthy some good, especially this post (or maybe this post, too). Unfortunately, she's too deluded and arrogant to realize how scientifically ignorant she is; so it would probably just be a waste.
oracknows | June 20, 2008I know I like to say that woo is eternal, and it is. That doesn't, however, mean that individual examples of woo are necessarily eternal. Some, it seems, are. Does anyone doubt, for example, that homeopathy, which has been around for over two hundred years now, will still be around 200 years from now? I'd like to think it won't, but fear that it will, even though I know I won't be around to find out. Ditto for energy-based "healing" and naturopathy, among others. On the other hand, not all woo is eternal. Sometimes the reason is fashion, which, as we all know, is fickle. Sometimes the reason…
oracknows | June 19, 2008...and his name is Edzard Ernst.
And here's the reason why.
Anyone who can rile up homeopaths that much is my kind of guy.
oracknows | June 19, 2008I'm a cancer surgeon, and if there's one thing that drives me straight to the liquor cabinet it has to be quack cancer "cures." Very early in the history of this blog, I discussed one of the biggest quacks of all time, a woman who thinks that all cancer is caused by a liver fluke (but only if the patient has propyl alcohol in his body, which, according to her, allows the fluke to become established) and that she can cure all cancer with a combination of herbs and the use of a device that she calls a "Zapper" (which looks suspiciously like a Scientology E-meter). I'm referring, of course, to…
oracknows | June 19, 2008I just shook my head as I perused this item on Pharyngula earlier this morning. What else can you do? The irrationality and lunacy is beyond belief as I read a story about a mother named Colleen Leduc called into school because a report of sexual abuse was made about her autistic daughter Victoria:
The frightened mother rushed back to the campus and was stunned by what she heard - the principal, vice-principal and her daughter's teacher were all waiting for her in the office, telling her they'd received allegations that Victoria had been the victim of sexual abuse - and that the CAS had been…
oracknows | June 18, 2008Color me unimpressed.
As I mentioned last week, that opportunist who has apparently become a paid shill for the hardcore antivaccination movement (namely Generation Rescue, Autism Research Institute, National Autism Association, Coalition for SAFE MINDS, and Talk About Curing Autism, all of whom helped to fund his recent trip to the U.K. and, according to Kirby's announcements and advertisements, appear to be funding his speaking engagements), David Kirby, is making a tour of the Northeast to spew his special brand of credulous idiocy about vaccines and autism hither and yon. I listed his…
oracknows | June 18, 2008David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, Adjunct Associate Professor of Public Health at Yale University is not happy.
No, he is not happy at all. Specifically, he is not happy with the skeptical blogosphere. He apparently feels that we nasty, close-minded skeptics have been so very unfair in our discussions of him. Specifically, he is not happy how several of us have called him to task for his remarks at the 1st Annual Integrative Medicine Scientific Symposium held in April at Yale University. In particular, what stood out (and provoked the sarcasm and contempt of several bloggers devoted to…
oracknows | June 16, 2008The other day, in response to several e-mails asking me about the latest bit of bad science and epidemiology purporting to support the idea that mercury in the thimerosal preservative that used to be in many childhood vaccines is a major cause of autism, I posted links to EpiWonk's thee-part (so far) takedown of this execrable study, whose passage through the peer-review system unchallenged is evidence of just how screwed up peer review can be at some journals. I forgot at the time that there is another, equally, if not even more, detailed takedown of this new bit of pseudoscience posted at a…
oracknows | June 15, 2008Several people have been sending me either links to this paper or even the paper itself:
Young HA, Geier DA, Geier MR. (2008). Thimerosal exposure in infants and neurodevelopmental disorders: An assessment of computerized medical records in the Vaccine Safety Datalink. J Neurol Sci. 2008 May 14 [Epub ahead of print]. (Full text here.)
Some have asked me whether I was planning on deconstructing it, given that the mercury militia has apparently been promoting it as "evidence" that it really, truly, and honestly was the mercury in vaccines after all that caused autism. I did mention it about…
oracknows | June 14, 2008Some of you may have heard of John Scudamore's Whale.to site. I've referred to it in the past as a repository of some of the wildest and most bizarre "alternative" medicine claims out there. However, I will admit that I've only ever scratched the surface of the insanity that is Whale.to.
Kathleen Seidel has dug deeply into the madness.
It goes far beyond what even I had thought. She found parts of the website that I had never known to exist. For example, the complete text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is there. There's also the complete text of Maniacal World Control Thru The Jesuit…
oracknows | June 13, 2008
Hard as it is to believe, this little weekly vanity project of mine, this little weekly excursion into the wild and wacky world of woo, is fast approaching two years of existence. Really. I kid you not. This wouldn't really disturb me so much except that I had been rather hoping to do a special anniversary edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo in a couple of weeks, but I really don't have anything suitable. No, it's not that I don't have lots of woo in the infamous Folder of Woo. There's stuff there for the foreseeable future. It's just that I'm like a little kid. When a really, really good…
oracknows | June 12, 2008One of the most common aspects of any good conspiracy theory is that "they" know about it but are covering it up, "they" usually being the government. Usually, the "evidence" that "they" know consists third- or fourth-hand unverifiable stories from a "friend of a friend of a friend" who, very conveniently, just so happened to be in just the right place at just the right time to overhear just the right tidbit of information that shows that "they" know all about "it." The exact conspiracy theory is almost irrelevant. Be it alien abductions, the "9/11 Truth" movement, Bigfoot sightings, or…