Quackery
oracknows | October 26, 2007Some woo is very, very complicated. The reason, of course, is that the often self-contradicting complexity of this sort of woo serves to make it harder for people without specialized training to figure out easily that it makes no sense scientifically. It's more a matter of baffling 'em with bullshit than because such complexity is actually needed. (No one that I can think of personifies this better than Lionel Milgrom, a man who's a veritable poet of woo.) Other times, the concept behind the woo is simple. In fact, it's usually just one idea. In fact, this one idea is usually based on an…
oracknows | October 25, 2007This has been a bad week at skeptics' school. Apparently, skeptical bloggers have been misbehaving left and right. Apparently we as the skeptical blogosphere have been very, very naughty indeed. Worse, the essays that we've handed in are apparently not pleasing to the teacher. Worst of all, we've been mischievously copying a screed against homeopaths and dispersing it far and wide across the blogosphere. Fortunately, Le Canard Noir is there to oversee detention in the 72nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle over at the quackometer blog. Head on over to detention and see what's going on.
Also,…
oracknows | October 24, 2007Wow, after my post about Le Canard Noir's being threatened with legal action for criticizing the Society of Homeopaths, I'm glad to know that I won't be being sued for having reposted his criticism.
Whines the Society of Homeopaths:
The Society of Homeopaths took the content of the 2006 BBC Newsnight programme on malaria very seriously and responded via press statements and media interviews promising action if it were required. We contacted the programme makers directly to ask for their evidence that any Society members had given dangerous or misleading advice to members of the public. They…
oracknows | October 23, 2007Regular readers know that I've long been disturbed by the increasing infiltration of non-evidence-based "alternative" medical therapies into academic medical centers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). I've come across another example of how much this has occurred. This time around, it's come in the form of a "debate" being held at 2 PM on Thursday, October 25 at the University of Connecticut Health Center entitled Homeopathy: Quackery Or A Key To The Future of Medicine? It's being touted thusly:
On October 25, 2007, the University of Connecticut Health Center will be hosting a historic debate on…
oracknows | October 19, 2007DNA is an amazing molecule. How evolution could have, over eons, fashioned such an amazingly simple yet complex method of storing biological information and coding the proteins that carry out the functions of life is one of the great wonders of biology. Harnessing the power of DNA, through genetic engineering, the study of the genome, and epigenetics, has allowed scientists a deeper insight than ever before possible into diseases as diverse as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and inherited metabolic disorders, to name a few. I manipulate DNA in my laboratory, in order to make it do my bidding…
oracknows | October 18, 2007PZ seems to think that the whole "LOL" thing has gone too far. He may be right. In fact, I've even commented on it before.
Even though I have a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around the whole "LOLCats" phenomenon and its various bizarre spinoffs, I do have to admit that I've found one LOL spinoff that's pretty darned amusing.
Are you ready for LOLQuacks?
Some examples:
OK, I know the above has nothing to do with quackery, but as a fan of the Fantastic Four and a connoisseur of pareidolia, I couldn't resist. On with a few homeopathy-related examples:
This one is amusing because I…
oracknows | October 18, 2007Whatever criticisms I may have had for prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris otherwise, one area that I'm totally down with both of them on is their criticism of the undue respect and consideration we as a society give to religious ideas. This consideration is rarely, if ever, based on the merit of the ideas, but rather solely because they are religious ideas. Many of these ideas, if they were not based on religion, wouldn't be given anywhere near the respect or deference that they are now. But, because they are based on a faith in the supernatural, for some reason we as a…
oracknows | October 17, 2007I've written before about how one of the favorite tactics of those who do not like my insistence on applying skepticism, science, and critical thinking to the claims of alternative medicine or my refusal to accept a dichotomy between "alternative" and "conventional" medicine is to try so smear me as some sort of "pharma shill." It's happened so often ever since my Usenet days that I even sometimes joke about it preemptively sometimes when writing skeptical posts or make smart aleck comments asking where I can sign up to get those big checks from big pharma, given that they'd almost certainly…
oracknows | October 15, 2007It's rare that one sees an editorial this spot on, but it happened a couple of days ago in The Washington Post:
The debate over vaccine litigation has thus shifted from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt. While the number of major studies that have failed to find any substantive link between vaccines and developmental disorders or autism is now in the double-digits (including a September 27th CDC study in the New England Journal), critics are effectively demanding that scientists prove that thimerosal does not cause illness -- an impossible standard.
The very success of…
oracknows | October 15, 2007About a week ago, I wrote about how the wooiest of woo, reiki, has infiltrated one of the best academic trauma centers in the U.S. In it, I lamented that I was feeling increasingly alone in being disturbed by this infiltration of religious pseudoscience into bastions of scientific medicine.
Fortunately for me, Dr. RW is as dismayed as I am:
Out here in the hinterlands I can only wonder what's going on in academic medicine these days. Is there anyone there for whom the standards of science mean anything at all? Well, there must be. There are plenty of people who teach and write about evidence…
oracknows | October 15, 2007Today is a very sad day in the autism blogosphere. The news I am going to discuss saddens me and should sadden anyone concerned with autism, particularly in combating the antivaccination hysteria and the outright quackery that flows from it promulgated by so many these days, from J. B. Handley to Jenny McCarthy, who couldn't be more different other than their being twits.
One of the longest-running and best autism blogs, Left Brain, Right Brain, is closing.
It would be one thing if the trials and tribulations of everyday life had led Kev to make this decision, as they do for so many other…
oracknows | October 14, 2007About a week ago, I posted about a truly execrably credulous article on alternative medicine published at CNN.com, which basically took a panel of true believers and asked them which five alternative medicine modalities had the best evidence to show that they "work."
Now, Steve Novella weighs in. His key point, with which I agree, is that "alternative" medicine advocates (or "complementary and alternative medicine," or CAM) have been wildly successful in framing their favored woo as being on an equal footing with "conventional" medicine, all the while carving out a double standard that allows…
oracknows | October 13, 2007The Skeptical Surfer informs me of a rather disturbing programming decision by PBS:
I first caught wind of the autism film "Beautiful Son" through the surfing community. Surf filmmaker Don King has an autistic son. Being a filmmaker, Don always has a video camera at hand and has documented his "journey" of discovering that his child has autism. This, along with other footage and interviews, have become a film about autism called "Beautiful Son."
[...]
The film has not yet premiered, but there is enough supporting evidence via a web site and film preview to draw a few conclusions. Let's start…
oracknows | October 12, 2007Woo-meisters will not be pleased. While perusing this week's Skeptics' Circle, I was reminded of something that I had meant to post about a couple of days ago.
I don't know how he did it or where he got it, but somehow he has found the Holy of Holies for woos everywhere. He found The Woo Handbook. In it, he finds the twenty main strategies for dealing with Skeptics. They're pretty much all there: shifting the goalposts, labeling skeptics as "close-minded," introducing quantum mechanics, and appeals to ignorance, along with #18, the technique of woos that probably annoys me the most (at least…
oracknows | October 12, 2007
Regular readers of this blog are probably aware of my general opinion about Reiki and other "energy healing" modalities. In short, they're woo, pure and simple. Consequently, one might reasonably ask why I've never featured the woo that is Reiki in Your Friday Dose of Woo. There's a simple reason for that.
Basic Reiki is boring.
Really, I mean it. In and of itself, it just doesn't reach the level of sheer ecstatic nuttiness that I like to feature every week. Oh, sure, there's lots of handwaving about "channeling the universal energy" through the healer to augment the life force of the…
oracknows | October 11, 2007One of the biggest complaints from alternative medicine practitioners is that some vast cabal, presumably made up big pharma, the CDC, the NIH, the AMA, and "conventional" doctors, is "suppressing" alternative medicine. Yes, true believers like, say, Mike Adams will claim that big pharma is going to suppress their free speech about "alternatives" and thus deny you your "heath freedom," which is in reality the freedom of quacks to push quackery without being hassled by pesky things like government agencies requiring that practitioners practice evidence-based medicine.
So what happens when…
oracknows | October 11, 2007I should have guessed.
Leave it to uber-crank (a. k. a. One Crank To Rule Them All) Mike Adams, the "intellect" behind what is perhaps the crankiest website known to humankind (at least when it comes to medicine), NewsTarget.com, to try to slime Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As fellow ScienceBlogger Mark points out, in his "report" Breast Cancer Deception, Adams accomplishes this by characterizing Breast Cancer Awareness month as nothing more than part of a conspiracy by the "male-dominated" cancer industry to keep women down.
I have to admit, in the realm of sheer wingnuttery, I've seldom…
oracknows | October 9, 2007On occasion, I've thought of inaugurating awards for the looniest quackery, alternative medicine, or antivaccination craziness of the year. I was thinking of calling them the Woo Awards, but I've never actually gotten off my lazy posterior to do the work it would take to set up some sort of voting system, and I'm not so sure that a list picked out only by me wouldn't just end up reflecting my personal idiosyncrasies. Be that as it may, with the end of the year fast approaching, if I were going to do it now would be the time to start looking for nominations.
If I were going to give a prize for…
oracknows | October 8, 2007Regular readers know that I've long been dismayed at the increasing infiltration of non-evidence-based "alternative" medical therapies into academic medical centers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). It's gotten such a foothold that it's even showing up in the mandatory medical curriculum in at least one medical school. I've speculated before that academic medical centers probably see alternative medicine as both a marketing ploy to make themselves look more "humanistic" and a new revenue stream, given that most insurance companies won't pay for therapies without solid evidence of efficacy, meaning that…
oracknows | October 7, 2007I've had this story sent to me by a few readers over the weekend, and I think it's worth a brief comment.
I'm basically a child of the 1970s. Although I didn't watch it much, if ever, I remember Charlie's Angels when I was in junior high and high school. Like any adolescent who came of age in the late 1970s, I remember the famous and hot-selling poster of Farrah Fawcett, which graced the bedroom of more than one of my friends, although I never actually owned a copy. A while back, I heard that Fawcett had been successfully treated for anal cancer. Now, I hear from my readers that her anal…