Quackery
oracknows | February 25, 2008One way that pseudoscience tries to maintain a patina of respectability to the outside world, a patina that sometimes even manages to take in researchers unacquainted with its methods, is through the "research conference" that has all the trappings of a research meeting but whose topics reveal the pseudoscience at the heart of it all. Such a conference is coming up this spring in Chicago from May 21-25.
Yes, I'm talking about the AutismOne conference, which, year after year, has managed to attract luminaries of the mercury militia and antivaccination movement, along with dubious practioners…
oracknows | February 24, 2008You can read parts I and II first, if you like.
Yet another reason Bill Maher is an idiot can be found in the video below, taken from Real Time With Bill Maher from the February 8 episode. I happened to catch it in reruns and was looking for a transcript or YouTube version. It's truly appalling. This guy claims to be a rationalist and mocks religion for its irrationality, and here he is spouting off the more of his usual ignorant, idiotic, stupid ideas about medicine and, yes, downright woo, to the point where even his guests start to wonder what the heck is going on. They seem to back away…
oracknows | February 23, 2008I recently wrote about the cowardly manner in which Netcetera booted the Quackometer off of its servers unceremoniously in response to a truly vacuous legal threat from a quack named Joseph Chikelue Obi.
Now, the little black duck has found a new ISP. The Quackometer is back in business! Hilariously, "Dr." Obi is already making threats again, only this time not just against Le Canard Noir, but against the entire skeptical blogosphere:
Alighting from the back seat of an Extended Black Daimler Limousine at the start of a Whirlwind Alternative Medicine Tour , essentially spanning right across…
oracknows | February 23, 2008Anyone who reads this blog knows my opinion of homeopathy. Just type "homeopathy" in the little search box on the left side of this blog, and you'll be greeted with many, many posts dating back to the very beginnings of Orac's presence on ScienceBlogs. Of course, science is with me on this one, as it does not support the primary claims of homeopathy, including:
Like cures like
Dilution with succussion makes a remedy stronger
Water has "memory" of remedies that it has come in contact with, which is how homeopathic remedies can "work," even though they've been diluted to the point where, even…
oracknows | February 22, 2008With the invasion of the orbs discussed earlier today, it's become apparent to me that now, more than ever, a healthy dose of skepticism and critical thinking is imperative. Fortunately, the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching and due to land on Thursday, February 28 at the Conspiracy Factory. So, if you're a skeptical blogger who wants to strut his or her stuff, now's the time to submit your best stuff from the last couple of weeks to Factician. Edition-specific instructions, deadline, and contact information are here. General guidelines for submitting and the schedule of future Skeptics'…
oracknows | February 21, 2008I've written a few posts now pointing out how, its claims that it is not "antivaccine" notwithstanding, for the mercury militia and those who think mercury in vaccines or vaccines themselves cause autism, it really is all about the vaccines, not any single ingredient, even mercury. I first noticed this nearly three years ago, and, if anything, recent events have made my observation even more obviously true. As multiple studies have exonerated the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal that was formerly found in most childhood vaccines and now only remains in trace amounts in flu vaccines…
oracknows | February 20, 2008A blogger's duty calls:
(Click for the full-sized version.)
It's true: A skeptical blogger's work is never done! When pseudoscience or quackery is noticed on the Internet, no mater what time of day or night, this skeptical blogger cannot resist the call to craft a takedown.
Just ask my wife.
oracknows | February 19, 2008Via WhiteCoat Underground, I've learned of a most disturbing development.
Remember Le Canard Noir? He's the skeptical blogger whose Quackometer was one of my favorite websites and tools for identifying pseudoscience and quackery caused him to run afoul of the Society of Homeopaths and a highly dubious practitioner named Joseph Chikelue Obi, both of whom tried to get his Internet service provider to boot him off of its servers using vacuous legal threats of libel actions? Both led to an outcry from the medical and skeptical blogosphere in the form of many, many copies of the offending text…
oracknows | February 19, 2008In response to my post yesterday castigating J. B. Handley of Generation Rescue for hypocritically accusing the American Academy of Pediatrics of "manipulating the media" when manipulating the media is Generation Rescue's raison d'être, Mike the Mad Biologist turned me on to a rather fascinating article in the New York Times by its Public Editor Clark Hoyt entitled The Doctors Are In. The Jury Is Out. It discusses a topic very near and dear to my heart, namely how newspapers report scientific or medical controversies, specifically, how the NYT covers controversies in which one side is the…
oracknows | February 18, 2008Three weeks ago, I wrote about some truly irresponsible antivaccination propaganda masquerading as entertainment that aired in the form of a television show called Eli Stone. This show, which portrayed its hero taking on the case of an autistic boy whose mother blamed his autism on thimerosal (going under the fictional name "mercuritol") in vaccines and scoring a $5.2 million settlement in the process. One consequence of this show was that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) was shaken out of its inaction enough to draft a letter protesting the show and urging its cancellation of the…
oracknows | February 17, 2008Dave Munger has done the science blogosphere a service by spearheading the effort to highlight and aggregate serious posts about peer-reviewed research through his Research Blogging aggregator website and his Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting blog. It's a great idea and a great source for what science and medical bloggers say about the latest published research. Dave is to be commended for creating such a useful site.
Of course, aggregating serious research blogging is all well and good, but the assumptions behind it are that the research and the blogger are serious and honest and…
oracknows | February 15, 2008I've become known as an advocate for evidence-based medicine (EBM) in the three years since I started this little bit of ego gratification known as Respectful Insolenceâ¢. One thing this exercise has taught me that I might never have learned before (and that I've only reluctantly begun to accept as true) is one huge problem with EBM. Not surprisingly, it has to do with how EBM is used to evaluate so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) therapies, many of which are highly implausible on a scientific basis, to put it exceedingly generously.
Consider homeopathy, which on a…
oracknows | February 15, 2008Balance.
It's what the woo-meisters who believe in "Feng Shui" tell us that it will bring to those who use its principles to arrange the objects in their life, be they furniture, homes, the design of buildings, or even the layouts of whole cities. Indeed, Feng Shui tells us that the way we arrange objects in our environment, choose a place to live, or even choose burial plots can allow us to achieve "harmony" with our environment. Obviously, this is true in a trivial sense. If your house is full of crap piled everywhere in seemingly random distributions, it is going to have a negative impact…
oracknows | February 14, 2008It figures again.
I go a few days without Internet access again, and not only does Generation Rescue take out a full page antivaccination ad full of stupidity in USA Today, which I couldn't resist opening both barrels on earlier, but a study's lead senior author is someone I know (albeit not well) about three topics I'm very interested in: breast cancer, health information on the Internet, and so-called "complementary and alternative" medicine. Not surprisingly, in my absence blog stalwarts Abel Pharmboy and Steve Novella already beat me to it in fine form. You might ask if that would in any…
oracknows | February 8, 2008In the year and a half or so that I've been doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I must admit that I've come across some truly weird stuff. Stuff so weird that, after reading it, you wonder either, "How on earth could someone seriously think something like this is true or would work?" or "How can anyone be so unscrupulous as to scam people like this?" Not infrequently, both questions come to mind simultaneously. Other times, I realize that it's fundamentalist religion of some sort or bizarre spiritual quasi-religious beliefs that are behind the woo. I've also started to notice recurring themes,…
oracknows | February 7, 2008I was perusing my newsfeeds last night looking for topics for Your Friday Dose of Woo this week when I came across what, initially at least, I considered to be primo material for my weekly bit of fun at the expense of the more far out excursions into woo. Then I thought about it some more. Early in the history of YFDoW, I admit that I did a couple of misfires. Perhaps the most notorious misfire was when I decided to take on the German New Medicine. Certainly the woo was there and it was good, but I quickly regretted taking such a lighthearted approach to this topic because it quickly became…
oracknows | February 6, 2008I sometimes feel a bit guilty beating up on homeopathy. It just seems like beating up on a blind man. The feeling passes quickly, of course, but it's at least somewhat understandable. Homeopathy is so patently ridiculous from a scientific standpoint that watching homeopaths try to justify and defend a therapy that consists of substances that are usually so diluted that there is not a single molecule remaining by invoking the "memory" of water or even quantum theory is, in a perverse way, entertaining to a skeptic like me. I'm always waiting to see what sort of strange analogy or explanation…
oracknows | February 5, 2008I love it when advocates of "alternative" medicine start combining their therapies. Well, I don't "love" it because they are combining two wildly improbable therapies so much as I love it for the entertainment value. Here's one that didn't quite reach the level of craziness needed for Your Friday Dose of Woo but that I can't resist mentioning. It's the combination of the ultimate woo with one of the most popular forms of woo. I have two words for you:
Homeopathy and acupuncture.
What an excellent combination! They call it "acupoint injection therapy" because they inject homeopathic remedies…
oracknows | February 5, 2008I hadn't planned on blogging about vaccines again for a while. Really, I hadn't. Even I realize the risk of beating the proverbial dead horse just one time too often. Also, It seems that I've been writing about antivaccination loons a lot lately, even more than usual. However, aside from a prime time spot for antivaccinationist propganda, the news has been mostly good, with study after study poking holes below the waterline in the hull of the rickety rustbucket of a boat that is the whole antivaccinationist belief that vaccines cause autism.
Here's another one.
This time, in yet another in a…
oracknows | February 4, 2008...posterior:
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russians visiting a health resort received a rude shock when a nurse used hydrogen peroxide instead of water to give them enemas.
Itar-Tass news agency reported Thursday that 17 tourists in the Caucasus spa town of Yessentuki had to be treated in hospital after the mix-up.
All I can say is...ouch! It's a wonder none of them burned a hole in the colon and needed an emergency operation. What would EneMan think? But what's really funny is the excuse for the mixup:
Sources at the sanatorium said the mistake was explained by water and hydrogen peroxide looking the…