quackery
oracknows | February 1, 2015
I swear, I had wanted to write about something else today. I really had. The reason is that we're in one of those stretches of time where things seem to be happening fast and furious that have led most of my posts over the last couple of weeks to be about the Disneyland measles outbreak, how it was facilitated by the antivaccine movement, and the fallout, both in terms of the measles outbreak continuing to spread and the pushback by antivaccinationists anxious to distance themselves from blame for the outbreak. Yes, I've written about "Dr. Bob" Sears, "Dr. Jay" Gordon, and, most recently,…
oracknows | January 30, 2015
Yesterday, I wrote about false balance in reporting on vaccines in the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak. For those who've never encountered this blog, what I mean by false balance is when journalists, in a misguided belief that there are "two sides" (i.e., an actual scientific controversy) about the safety of childhood vaccines and whether they cause autism and all the other ills blamed on them by antivaccinationists or not, interview an antivaccine activist, advocate, or sympathizer for "balance" and to "show both sides of the story." The problem with that technique, so deeply…
oracknows | January 19, 2015
I'm depressed and angry as I write this.
The reason for this is simple. I hate it when cancer quacks claim the lives of patients with cancer, particularly patients who were eminently treatable for cure. It's happened again, and it makes me sad. Florida cancer quack Brian Clement has claimed the life of Makayla Sault, an 11 year old Ojibwe girl with leukemia:
The entire community of New Credit is in mourning today, following the news of the passing of 11 year old Makayla Sault.
The child suffered a stroke on Sunday morning and was unable to recover. Friends and family from across the…
oracknows | January 5, 2015The holidays must truly be over. I say this because, starting around Sunday, the drumbeat of blogging topics that I haven't covered but that apparently you, my readers, want me to cover has accelerated. However, before I can move on to what might or might not be greener blogging pastures, material-wise, I feel obligated to finish what I started yesterday, namely the deconstruction of an advertising supplement promoting the "integration" of "traditional medicine" (in particular, traditional Chinese medicine, a.k.a. TCM) for which Science and the American Association for the Advancement of…
oracknows | December 31, 2014She's baa-aack.
Remember Stephanie Seneff? When last Orac discussed her, she had been caught dumpster diving into the VAERS database in order to torture the data to make it confess a "link" between aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and acetaminophen and—you guessed it!—autism. It was a bad paper in a bad journal known as Entropy that I deconstructed in detail around two years ago. As I said at the time, I hadn't seen a "review" article that long and that badly done since the even more horrible article by Helen Ratajczak entitled Theoretical aspects of autism: Causes–A review (which, not…
oracknows | December 29, 2014
Christmas is over, and we're in that weird time between Christmas and New Years Day, when, usually at least, I have to work but so many people are out and so few patients seem to want to come in that it hardly seems worth the effort. So it is with the blog, too. The week between Christmas and New Years tends to be the lowest traffic period of the year. Although that's been true this year as well, I've noticed more commenting activity than I usually see. So, I figured, what the heck? There are odds and ends worth writing about, although I don't plan on doing an epic posts before next Monday…
oracknows | December 26, 2014
After I woke up this morning, the haze induced by feasting and hanging out with family only slowly clearing, I debated about whether I wanted to post anything at all today. After all, in much of the English-speaking world, it's still a holiday, Boxing Day. Although not an official holiday here in the US, when Christmas is on a Thursday, as it was this year, Boxing Day becomes an unofficial holiday that the majority of people not working in the retail sector seem to take off, the better to produce a four or five day weekend, depending upon whether they took Christmas Eve off as well. Also, it…
oracknows | December 23, 2014
Having recently discovered a veritable Library with Doctor Moon of antivaccine misinformation and quackery known as Modern Alternative Mama's blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and YouTube channel, I couldn't resist taking one more drought from the same well. It is, after all, almost Christmas, and truly, as far as the blog is concerned, the discovery of Kate Tietje, a.k.a. Modern Alternative Mama, was an early Christmas gift that could not but be opened immediately. Besides, with Christmas coming up in a couple of days, after today I plan on taking a brief blog break until Friday, with…
oracknows | December 18, 2014
With the way our dysfunctional federal government works, it's not uncommon for the end of a fiscal year to come and go without there being a budget for the next fiscal year in place. This phenomenon is particularly common during election years, and this year was no different. September 30 came and went, followed by the beginning of FY2015 on October 1 with no budget in place, just a continuing resolution. Finally, this week, Congress acted and passed a budget, but, as is often the case given that the President does not have line item veto power, the omnibus spending bill funding the…
oracknows | December 16, 2014
Not being Australian and, for some reason, never having encountered her promotion of "natural health" online before, I first encountered Jessica Ainscough, also known as "The Wellness Warrior" over a year ago when I learned that her mother Sharyn Ainscough had died of breast cancer. Her mother, it turns out, had rejected conventional treatment for her breast cancer and chosen instead the quackery known as Gerson therapy. It's a treatment regimen based on long-discredited view of how cancer forms and that requires the consumption of boatloads of supplements and the administration multiple…
oracknows | December 10, 2014
One aspect of my life that's kind of strange is how I've basically ended up back where I started. I was born and raised in southeast Michigan (born in the city of Detroit, actually, although my parents moved to the suburbs when I was 10). After going to college and medical school at the University of Michigan, I matched at a residency in Cleveland (regular readers know that it was Case Western Reserve University), and then did a fellowship in surgical oncology at the University of Chicago. Finally, I ended up taking my first "real" (i.e., faculty) job at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey…
oracknows | December 7, 2014
Last week, I discussed a monograph published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monographs entitled Clinical Practice Guidelines on the Use of Integrative Therapies as Supportive Care in Patients Treated for Breast Cancer. As you might remember, I was completely unimpressed. However, those guidelines were not the only thing in that particular JNCI monograph. There were lots of other articles, and, given that some of them show just how deeply quackery has insinuated itself into oncology in the form of "integrative oncology," I thought it was worth revisiting one more time.…
oracknows | December 4, 2014
Cancer cure testimonials due to alternative medicine have been a staple of this blog since its very inception. Unfortunately, another staple of this blog since very early on has included stories of children with cancer whose lives have been endangered when their their parents refuse effective cancer therapy for their cancer, in particular chemotherapy. The most recent such story is a particularly depressing one that cropped up last month in Canada. It was the story of an 11-year-old First Nations girl whose parents opted for what they called "traditional" medicine instead of effective…
oracknows | November 28, 2014
I hope my U.S. readers have all had a happy Thanksgiving. Today has been known at least since the mid-1970s as Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year. Whether it's still true or not, given the relentless proliferation, progression, and metastasis—yes, the use of terms related to cancer is intentional—of holiday sales right up until Christmas, I don't know. I do know that I plan on going nowhere near any store bigger than a convenience store until next week if I can possibly help it. I'm also sitting back and congratulating myself on one of the smartest decisions I've made in a…
oracknows | November 26, 2014
I don't think I mentioned this, but I'm on a bit of a staycation this week. I figured, what the heck? After coming home from Skepticon I could do with a little R&R. Of course, fool that I am, I still can't resist blogging a bit. On the other hand, the day before Thanksgiving I realize I should dial it back a bit and keep it brief. Everyone in the US (which, sorry, international readers, still make up the vast majority of my readers) is generally busy getting ready and might not have time for checking in with their favorite blogs, particularly blogs of bloggers known for their logorrhea…
oracknows | November 25, 2014
I realize that I risk getting repetitive by writing about this again, but it's a rich vein that just keeps on producing and producing. It also demonstrates that, for every tragedy as huge as the ongoing Ebola outbreak that has killed over 5,000 people in West Africa thus far, there always exist well-meaning people who are into such utter quackery that they can't help but risk making things worse. In my talk at Skepticon on Saturday I discussed how The Secret's Law of Attraction is, to my mind, the Central Dogma of Alternative Medicine, the idea that, if you want something bad enough and…
oracknows | November 20, 2014
Here we go yet again.
I’ve been interested in the Ebola outbreak that’s been going on for months in west Africa for a number of reasons. First, it’s a bad disease, and this is the largest outbreak in history. over 5,000 people have died. Second, there’s been a lot of unreasonable fear mongering about the disease here in the US far beyond its actual threat level to the country. Third, of course, and perhaps most pertinent given the usual subject matter of this blog, is that the Ebola outbreak in Africa has been a godsend for quacks, cranks, and conspiracy theorists. There is no quackery or…
oracknows | November 17, 2014A few weeks ago, Steve Novella invited me on his podcast, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, to discuss a cancer case that has been in the news for several months now. The case was about an 11-year-old girl with leukemia who is a member of Canada’s largest aboriginal community. Steve wrote about this case nearly a month ago. Basically, the girl’s parents have been fighting for the right to use “natural healing” on their daughter after they stopped her chemotherapy in August because of side effects. It is a profoundly disturbing case, just as all the other cases I’ve discussed in which…
oracknows | November 14, 2014
It’s been a long and entertaining week. Well, at least part of the week was entertaining. After all, it was hard not to be mightily amused at what happened when Dr. Mehmet Oz, known to the world as America’s Doctor but to skeptics as America’s Quack, asked his Twitter followers to ask him anything under the hashtag #OzsInBox. It was, to put it mildly, a train wreck, but to skeptics it was an enormously entertaining train wreck. It seems fitting to finish it off with yet another example that provides compelling evidence of just how quacky naturopathy is. Why? Because it’s a point that can’t…
oracknows | November 12, 2014
Getting old sucks. I had a relatively long and busy day in the operating room yesterday, the kind of day that not so long ago I’d handle with no problem. This time around, though, it wiped me out, to the point where not long after dinner I crashed. Hard. Then I woke up around midnight long enough to drag my sorry posterior upstairs to my bed. It happens. It’s just that it seems to be happening more often these days.
So it was that I missed one of the most amusing Twitter happenings that I’ve seen in a long time; that is; until I woke up again early this AM. Dr. Oz just got pwned on Twitter…