Quackery
oracknows | April 17, 2008I've lamented the infiltration of woo into academic medicine. I've even gone so far as to try to keep a list of all the academic medical centers in North America that have "integrative medicine" programs that credulously teach and promote non-evidence-based medicine as though it were evidence-based with my Academic Woo Aggregator. I've speculated that the reason academic medical centers are susceptible to the blandishments of woo-meisters is because patients want it and are willing to pay for it. Given that insurance companies won't pay for this stuff, it's cash on the barrelhead direct from…
oracknows | April 16, 2008I'm not normally one to do link roundups or Instapundit-style one sentence "link and comment" posts. Sure, I do them occasionally, but I think the reason that I don't is that to me blogging is a way to express my views, not just to point to the views at others (in other words, because I'm just too enamored of my own prose). However, because of a bizarre confluence of my being at the AACR meeting and a bunch of good stuff showing up, there were some items that I just didn't have the chance to comment on, even though I wanted to. Moreover, because I want to do a couple of posts on the AACR…
oracknows | April 15, 2008Regular readers may have noticed that the usual prodigious amount of verbiage has fallen off a bit over the last few days. That's just because I've been very busy and not always around a reliable Internet connection. In some ways, I almost like the way I've been forced to write a bit better in that my posts are shorter. However, I know that after I return home from San Diego, my old habits will probably return fairly quickly.
I actually wasn't going to post anything today other than the plug for the Expelled Exposed website (oh, look! another plug!), mainly becauase I got in rather late last…
oracknows | April 14, 2008Between sessions here at the AACR meeting, I started thinking. (I realize that's often a dangerous thing to do, but sometimes I can't help myself.) What I was thinking about was my annual bit of "fluff with a bite," the 2008 edition of "What is an altie?" Why, I don't know, but I was. Then, this morning while quickly perusing a few blogs and reading my e-mail before heading off to the meeting's morning session, I noticed something in yesterday's post about the commonality between creationists (evolution denialists), Holocaust deniers, and other forms of denialists. It was a term, a throwaway…
oracknows | April 13, 2008So there I was, wandering through the exhibit hall at AACR when I came across the National Cancer Institute booth. The NCI has a booth at AACR and ASCO every year, and this year is no different. As I do most years, I wandered through the booth to see if there was anything that caught my interest, such as information that might help me stay funded.
There it was. No, not any information that could help me keep my NIH funding, alas. Worse, it was something that might make it even more difficult if in this tight funding environment the NCI is actually spending money on this stuff. The sign read…
oracknows | April 11, 2008It's that time of year again. Actually, it's well over a month past that time of year.
Long-timers may remember that, near the very beginning of my old Blogger blog over three years ago, I did a post entitled What is an altie? It was basically a Jeff Foxworthy-like listing of "You just might be an altie if..." statements that, I think, had a good point. For those of you not familiar with the term "altie," it was coined on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative to describe a certain hardcore variety of alternative medicine aficianado who is utterly immune to evidence or reason. The…
oracknows | April 10, 2008Whenever I'm looking at fringe scientific claims, I'm always on the lookout for things that help me conclude whether I'm looking at "legitimate" fringe ideas or pseudoscience and woo. One observation that I've found helpful in leading me in one direction or the other is to look for certain dead giveaways that what we're looking at is almost certainly pseudoscience or woo is the presence or absence of conspiracy-mongering based on unverifiable "evidence." I find a lot of it, and the other day I found one of the best examples of it I've ever seen. It comes, not surprisingly, from Dan Olmsted,…
oracknows | April 4, 2008Woo has patterns. I've learned to see them, and, if you read Your Friday Dose of Woo on a regular basis, perhaps you're starting to see them too. Not that I had originally intended to become so well-versed in woo that I start to notice these things. What really happened is that I just sort of fell into it when one day I happened to come up with the idea for this little Friday feature. Truth be told, it seems to have grown and taken on a life of its own, such that on weeks when I don't do it (like last week), something about the blog just doesn't feel right. On the other hand, it sometimes…
oracknows | April 4, 2008Your Friday Dose of Woo has been interrupted to bring you an important rant. The previously scheduled installment will be delayed and will appear later on in the day.
This is more important.
A common characteristic of cranks and denialists, be they antivaccinationists or large corporations or whatever, is an intolerance of criticism for their views. All too frequently, this has taken the form of the abuse of the legal system in order to try to silence their opponents. The Society of Homeopaths did it to a blogger a while back. A quack by the name of Joseph Chikelue Obi did it to the same…
oracknows | April 3, 2008I thought it was an April Fools' joke, but it wasn't. It was posted one day too late, but there it was staring at me:
On World Autism Day: A Plea for Better Journalism.
On the surface, who could argue with that, particularly with David Kirby's regular carpet-bombing logic and science with unctuous and slimy speculation and prevarication? Definitely, such deceptive antivaccination-sympathetic "journalism" needs to go.
But then I noticed who wrote this article.
Dan Olmsted.
Yes, Dan Olmsted, perhaps the worst journalist ever when it comes to autism, the man who swallowed whole anecdotal and…
oracknows | April 3, 2008Believe it or not, there was a time when I didn't consider acupuncture to be a form of woo.
I know, I know, it's hard to believe, given the sorts of posts I've done recently on acupuncture, but it's true. Certainly, I didn't believe the whole rigamarole about needles somehow "restoring the flow of qi" or anything like that, but I did wonder if maybe there was some physiologic mechanism at work behind acupuncture that produced real benefits in terms of pain relief above that of placebo. Sure, I may have dismissed homeopathy as the pure magical thinking that it was, but acupuncture I wasn't so…
oracknows | April 2, 2008This happened last week when I was feeling under the weather, and somehow I never got around to it. Fortunately, however, I've learned that there may indeed by justice in the case of Madeline Neuman, the 11-year-old child whose parents let her die of diabetic ketoacidosis. This story was widely reported thusly:
"We just believe in the Bible, that's all. This is our faith," said Leilani Neumann, the mother of 11-year-old Madeline Neumann, who died from a treatable form of diabetes after her parents chose to pray for their daughter in place of seeking medical attention.
Madeline Neumann had…
oracknows | April 1, 2008In the three years that I've been blogging, one thing I've learned about myself is that I'm not very good at coming up with good April Fools' Day posts. Yes, I have tried it before. For example, a couple of years ago, I tried to make everyone believe that I had gone soft on woo, that I had had a change of heart.
No one was fooled, for even a moment, and if there's something a good April Fools' Day post has to have if it's going to be believable long enough for the "April Fool!" punchline to be surprising, it's a plausible story. Let's face it, Orac saying he's starting to groove on homeopathy…
oracknows | March 31, 2008I've never been able to figure out how anyone who claims to be devoted to science and scientific medicine can take homeopathy the least bit seriously. None of it makes any sense scientifically. Its basic principal of the "Law of Similars" has far more basis in the concepts of sympathetic magic than anything that science has to say, while its concept that diluting a substance (with shaking--a homeopath will always tell you that the shaking is absolutely necessary!) far beyond the point where there is likely to be even a single molecule of the remedy left actually makes it more potent has no…
oracknows | March 28, 2008I tell ya, I get sick for a few days, and the antivaccination cranks come out of the woodwork. This time around, it's über-crank Vox Day entering the fray (or, as I like to call him Vox "hey, it worked for Hitler" Day). We've seen him in action before. Be it using the example of Nazi Germany as a reason why we could, if we so desired, round up all the illegal immigrants in the country and eject them, labeling women as "fascists" who shouldn't have the right to vote, or falling hook, line, and sinker for an evidence-free antivaccination claim, when it comes to an inflated opinion of his own…
oracknows | March 28, 2008I have good news and bad news for you.
First, the good news. The devastating death crud that has kept me in its grip for nearly a week now appears to be receding. For the first time, "whining" or not, I start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Whether it's due to PalMD's kind offer of Pranic Healing or not, I don't know, but things are on the mend.
And now the bad news. There will be no Friday Dose of Woo this week. The reason is simple. My mucus-laden head continues to pound, and my hacking cough continues to put me into an ill mood. This makes it very difficult to attain and…
oracknows | March 25, 2008Sadly, the death crud continues apace, although at a low enough level that I feel I can eke out a brief post, mainly because it relates to what I've been saying all along about a group blog that I tend to dislike. Both Shifting Baselines and DrugMonkey have pointed out that Huffington Post blogger David Sloan Wilson has asked if it should have a science section. As part of the article, he offers the "only" argument why not:
The only argument against creating a "Science" section, as far as I can see, is that it would be B-O-R-I-N-G. Sure we should know about science, and we should also eat our…
oracknows | March 25, 2008The annoying death crud that has gripped me continues apace. Fortunately, I happen to have a rather interesting guest blog post that I've had lying around a while, and now seems like the perfect time to use it. It comes from Dr. Arnon Krongrad, an expert in prostate cancer and minimally invasive surgery. I'm publishing it because he has a rather interesting observation about the use of supplements and how it may contribute to the development of aggressive prostate cancer. Here is Dr. Krongrad's contribution:
What would you pay to have erections? Would you pay with your life? A report from…
oracknows | March 21, 2008Sometimes a topic demands to be included in my little Friday bit of hubris and tweaking. Usually when that happens, it's obvious because somehow the topic is synergistic with what's been going on during the preceding week on the ol' blog, in the same way that herbalists claim that all the various compounds and contaminants somehow produce a synergistic therapeutic effect. Wait a minute. That's not such a good example, mainly because woo-meisters usually make this claim without much in the way of evidence, and the examples of true synergism between components of an herbal remedy are few and…
oracknows | March 20, 2008I have to hand it to Dan Olmsted. As Dr. Michael Egnor is for "intelligent design" creationism, ol' Danny Boy is the Energizer Bunny of antivaccinationism. Tag-teaming with fellow "journalist" David Kirby, who seems able to live rather well without actually, you know, having a regular job, ex-UPI correspondent Olmsted form the not-so-dynamic duo of vaccine and autism pseudoscience, the unrelenting propagandists who, despite all evidence to the contrary, keep insisting that it really, truly is the mercury in the vaccines and then, when science shows that it really isn't the mercury in…