Quackery
oracknows | May 7, 2008...because Dr. Roy Kerry, the negligent physician who killed an autistic child with chelation therapy and against whom criminal charges were dropped yesterday, wants to go back to work:
Dr. Roy Kerry, 70, of Sharpsville, read from a prepared statement today at the Butler offices of his attorney, Al Lindsay, but would not answer questions on the advice of his other lawyers. Kerry still faces a civil suit over the death of Abubaker Tariq Nadama, and a hearing on the future of his medical license.
"I plan to continue my life's work helping many patients with serious illnesses with the highest…
oracknows | May 7, 2008Longtime readers of this blog probably remember the tragic case of Abubakar Tariq Nadama, the five-year-old autistic boy who died as a result of being treated with chelation therapy three years ago by Dr. Roy Kerry, an otolaryngologist who had apparently had given up doing head and neck surgery in favor of the more lucrative pastures of woo. This case was about as clear as a case could get. A known potential complication of chelation therapy is a lowering of calcium levels in the blood, to the point that cardiac arrhythmias and cardiac arrest can occur. Moreover, children are more sensitive…
oracknows | May 6, 2008Since I'm almost never home in time to see the 6:30 PM news, it's unlikely I'll be seeing this series on NBC news about the "mind-body" connection when it airs, although I'll search for video later when I get a chance. Apparently I missed this last night:
When we were planning this week's series "the Mind Body Connection," Alex Wallace the executive producer of Nightly News asked me what was new with the alternative medicine movement, which has been in full swing for more than a decade.
The answer is that a handful of billionaires have brought alternative medicine into many the nation's major…
"Why aren't there more clinical trials studying the effect of CAM on cancer?" cries the CAM advocate
oracknows | May 6, 2008I've lamented time and time again just how much money the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) wastes on basic research and clinical trials of modalities that are, from a scientific viewpoint, so highly implausible that the chances of finding a clinically useful or relevant--or even a consistent statistically significant--effect (for example, homeopathy or reiki) or on therapies for which there is already abundant negative evidence (chelation therapy, for example) are vanishingly small. In this fifth year of a flat or declining NIH budget and of scientists facing…
oracknows | May 2, 2008Good news!
In the wake of having his fishing expedition of a subpoena against autism blogger Kathleen Seidel quashed, it would appear that lawyer to the mercury militia Clifford Shoemaker and his clients Seth and Lisa Sykes have decided to voluntarily dismiss their lawsuit against Bayer and no longer pursue it.
Of course, that brings up the question of just what the heck Shoemaker's attempts to dragoon unrelated parties such as Kathleen Seidel and Dr. Marie McCormick into the proceedings with dubious subpoenas was supposed to accomplish. Were such actions a sign of increasing desperation, a…
oracknows | May 2, 2008Over the last few years, depressingly, we've witnessed a rise in antivaccinationist activism. Beginning with the highly unethical activities of Andrew Wakefield and his bogus study in 1998 that set off a scare over the MMR vaccine supposedly causing autism that led to declining vaccination rates and skyrocketing measles and mumps rates in the U.K., it metastasized to the U.S. with hyped up concerns that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal used in most vaccines until 2001 was a cause of autism. Over the last year or so, it's been helped along by useful celebrity idiots like Jenny…
oracknows | May 2, 2008
As I approach the second anniversary of Your Friday Dose of Woo (now only a mere two months away), it occurs to me: What sort(s) of woo, if any, have I neglected? Is there a kind of woo that is commonplace but has somehow slipped under Orac's radar? Hard as it may be to believe, there have now been over 100 installments of my weekly bit of vanity. Looking back over it, I see all manner of woo. Quantum homeopathy? Check? Sound healing? Of course! DNA Activation? That was definitely a fun one! Detoxification footpads? Not once, but twice! 9/11 Truther conspiracy theories? Yes, I've even…
oracknows | May 1, 2008It's late, and I'm working on tomorrow's installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo; so I don't have the time to give this particularly dumb guest editorial Think twice before you vaccinate your child in the Winona Daily News, which is packed full of antivaccinationist lies and pseudoscience, a proper dose of the not-so-Respectful Insolence that it deserves. Suffice it to say that, while denying that they are antivaccination (as all antivaccinationists do), writers Jim and Laurie Jenkinson then go on to prove exactly the opposite by spewing an amazing collection of idiocy, including citing Robert…
oracknows | May 1, 2008...because Paul Offit's written a book:
AUTISM'S FALSE PROPHETS
Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure
Paul Offit, MD
Columbia University Press
September 2008
Genre: Non-Fiction/Medicine
Format: Hardcover
AUTISM'S FALSE PROPHETS will show the reader the incredible history of how greedy lawyers, doctors, and unknowing parents have helped prevent the search for the real cause of autism. As these forces conspire to blame vaccines or the preservatives used in vaccines for causing autism, the search for a real cure is hampered while millions of dollars go chasing after the wrong…
oracknows | April 29, 2008About a month ago, I wrote about an unbelievably sad story of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin who died of untreated diabetic ketoacidosis because she had been unfortunate enough to have been born into a family in which the parents believed in prayer rather than medicine. I say "unbelievably" because I find it truly difficult to believe that anyone in this day and age would willingly eschew effective medicine for their suffering child in favor of wishful thinking. Tragically and not surprisingly, prayer didn't work, and their child died. One of the unresolved issues at the time of the incident…
oracknows | April 29, 2008One of the most contentious and difficult aspects of trying to improve medical care in this country is enforcing a minimal "standard of care." Optimally, this standard of care should be based on science- and evidence-based medicine and act swiftly when a practitioner practices medicine that doesn't meet even a minimal requirement for scientific studies and clinical trials to support it. At the same time, going too far in the other direction risks stifling innovation and the ability to individualize treatments to a patient's unique situation--or even to use treatments that have only scientific…
oracknows | April 28, 2008Over the weekend there was a very good article in the Concord Monitor about Kathleen Seidel and her legal battle with Clifford Shoemaker, whose intrusive "fishing expedition" subpoena recently drew condemnation even from prominent antivaccination activists such as David Kirby and Dan Olmsted and was ultimately quashed with the possibility of sanctions. What this article does a good job for those new to the debate is to put things in some perspective in a relatively brief treatment; I encourage you to read the whole thing, and I will focus mostly on a couple of interesting tidbits in the…
oracknows | April 26, 2008Ah, a lazy Saturday morning. So here I am in the late morning, perusing my e-mail (including e-mail notifications of blog posts) after purposely not having checked them at all last night (and, in fact, even having gone to see a movie for the first time in many months), and what should a reader send me but a bit of very good news:
RALEIGH --A panel of the N.C. Medical Board recommended Thursday that Huntersville's Dr. Rashid Buttar be prohibited from treating children or patients with cancer because his alternative medicine practice is below accepted medical standards in North Carolina.
The…
oracknows | April 25, 2008
There's a new woo in town. Unfortunately, it's the same as the old woo.
I first noticed it around Christmas. Inexplicably, I started getting a greatly increased amount of traffic to an old Your Friday Dose of Woo post of mine. The post to which I'm referring is one that I did a year and a half ago about some fabulously silly woo that claimed to remove toxins through the soles of your feet through a special foot pad, which inspired me to entitle the post These boots were made for detoxifyin'. This product in question was called "Miracle Patches" and, it was claimed, can remove all manner of…
oracknows | April 22, 2008Ack!
Well, so much for Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's reputations for supposedly being well-informed about scientific issues. True, they didn't sink as far into the stupid as John McCain did about vaccines and autism, but what they said was bad enough. Let's put it this way: If David Kirby thinks what they said about vaccines and autism is just great, they seriously need to fire all their medical advisors and get new ones who know how to evaluate evidence:
No matter who wins in Pennsylvania today, the next President of the United States will support research into the growing evidence of…
oracknows | April 21, 2008Just reported by Kathleen Seidel:
From the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire, Case No. 1:08-mc-00013-JM:
ENDORSED ORDER granting MOTION to Quash Subpoena.
Text of Order: "Granted. Attorney Clifford Shoemaker is ordered to show cause within 10 days why he should not be sanctioned under Fed R Civ P 11 - see Fed R Civ P 45(a)(2)(B) which requires that a deposition subpoena be issued from the court in which the deposition is to occur and Fed R Civ P 45 (c)(1) commanding counsel to avoid burdensome subpoenas. A failure to appear will result in notification of Mr…
oracknows | April 21, 2008... are here.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that Paul quite understands how homeopathy supposedly works. He's gotten the claim that dilution and succussation make a substance more potent right, but I think he's misinterpreted the homeopathic principle of "like cures like." (As I've pointed out before, this concept is no more than an adaptation of sympathetic magic.) Instead, he's generalized in homeopathy that the diluted substance causes the opposite of its usual effect. This is not quite the full story. In homeopathy, the cure for a symptom or illness is indeed usually something that causes…
oracknows | April 21, 2008A couple of weeks ago, I commented about a frivolous, SLAPP-style subpoena directed at one of the most thorough, rational bloggers about autism out there, Kathleen Seidel by Clifford Shoemaker, the attorney for Rev. Lisa Sykes and her husband Seth Sikes, both of whom who are suing Bayer for alleged "vaccine damage" as a cause of their child's autism. The subpoena in question, issued mere hours after Seidel published a well-researched but particularly unflattering post about Clifford Shoemaker's activities suing vaccine manufacturers, was so obviously a fishing expedition designed to…
oracknows | April 18, 2008...death from pertussis.
Delaying effective treatment by taking the baby to a naturopath first didn't help either. With antivaccinationists making so much noise, look for more cases like the one above in your local emergency department soon. That will be the true legacy of the so-called "green our vaccines" movement.
oracknows | April 18, 2008
The woo is good again.
Regular readers may have caught an undercurrent of whining in the last few installments of my little Friday feature? Whining about what? A bit of burnout. In fact, looking back at my last few installments, I now wonder whether I was starting to show signs of burnout. There I was, complaining about having trouble coming up with new bits woo that really floated my boat enough to inspire me to ever more fevered bits of Respectful Insolenceâ¢. What a downer, man! Fortunately, this week was different. This week, there was an abundance of riches. This week, there were at…