quackery
oracknows | April 5, 2013Over the years this blog's been in existence, I've fallen into a habit in which I tend to like to finish off the week taking on a bit of science (well, usually pseudoscience) that is either really out there, really funny, or in general not as heavy as, for example, writing about someone like Stanislaw Burzysnki. Indeed, for nearly two years, I even turned into a feature, Your Friday Dose of Woo. Eventually, I got a bit tired of being straitjacketed into having to find something kooky or wacky every Friday, and I let the feature lapse. That doesn't mean that I don't still deliver an occasional…
oracknows | April 2, 2013Last week, the Journal of Pediatrics published a study that did a pretty good job of demolishing a favorite antivaccine trope used to frighten parents. In fact, it's one of the most effective of antivaccine tropes, as evidenced by a large number of parents who are generally pro-vaccine expressing doubts when asked about this particular antivaccine slogan. I'm referring, of course, to the "too many too soon" slogan, in which antivaccinationists try to imply that the current vaccine schedule somehow "overwhelms" an infant's immune system and leads to autism by some unknown and undemonstrated…
oracknows | March 31, 2013It's been less than a week since I wrote about Stanislaw Burzynski. In fact, as hard as it is to believe, I've been trying not to. Obviously, I'm failing, but what can I say? Things keep happening.
In particular, there's Eric Merola. You remember Eric Merola? He's the producer of a propaganda film extolling the virtues of Stanislaw Burzynski who decided that one movie was not enough. He needed to make another, in which skeptics are painted as the enemy, a shadowy cabal. Well, apparently he saw a certain video I posted last Friday, and he was displeased. Whether it was because the speaker…
oracknows | March 27, 2013When I wrote about the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) trial last week, little did I suspect that I would be revisiting the topic again so soon. For those of you not familiar with TACT, it was a trial designed to test a favorite quack treatment for cardiovascular disease, chelation therapy. It is, as I have described many times in the past, an incredibly implausible therapy based on a hugely simplistic concept that because calcium accumulates in atherosclerotic lesions, then using chelation therapy could remove the calcium and reduce the lesions. Chelation therapy is a favorite…
oracknows | March 21, 2013I don't always blog about stories or studies that interest me right away. Part of the reason is something I've learned over the last eight years of blogging, namely that, while it's great to be the firstest with the mostest, I'd rather be the blogger with the mostest than the firstest. I've learned this from occasionally painful experience, although I'd be lying if I didn't admit that in part this is a rationalization for the fact that I have a demanding day job that keeps me from jumping all over stories and studies of interest in the way that some bloggers can. There's also the simple fact…
oracknows | March 20, 2013Heidi Stevenson amuses me.
The reasons are legion. Be it the time when Heidi lectured scientists on anecdotal evidence (which she values far more highly than scientists, of course, declaring it the "basis of all knowledge"); launched a vile and nonsensical attack on Stephen Barrett; argued against prior plausibility with using a straw man argument so massive that if it were set on fire (which she did) it could be seen from space; or made an even more idiotic argument to try to "prove" that wi-fi signals and EMF cause autism, Heidi never fails to deliver the stupid in mass quantities of black…
oracknows | March 4, 2013I'm running out of popcorn again.
I know I've been writing a lot about the latest internecine war among cranks. It's a battle royale whose first shot occurred when everybody's favorite Boy Wonder "reporter" betrayed his mentors with a missive published on a hive of scum and quackery even more wretched that the hive of scum and quackery at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, namely The Bolen Report. He even went so far as to publish private e-mails of prominent members of the antivaccine group SafeMinds. It didn't take long for SafeMinds to unleash a counterattack, joined by Dan Olmsted…
oracknows | February 25, 2013It's been well over two weeks since I urged everyone to get out the popcorn and sit back to enjoy the internecine war going on over in the antivaccine movement. The reason for my chuckling was the way that everyone's favorite Boy Wonder Reporter Propagandist for the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, Jake Crosby, had apparently turned on his masters because he was ticked off at a perceived betrayal of purity in their antivaccine beliefs, so much so that he actually posted a screed against the other wretched hive of scum and quackery besides AoA or The Huffington Post, namely the…
oracknows | February 13, 2013Yesterday, I wrote about how "they" view "us," the "they" being believers in dubious medicine, pseudoscience, and outright quackery. As examples, I used believers in the unsupported claims of "brave maverick" cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski and antivaccine activists who are utterly convinced, against all science and evidence, that vaccines caused their children's autism. I pointed out at the time that many of these people really, really do believe that "we" (i.e., skeptics and supporters of science-based medicine who criticize the various modalities they passionately believe in) are not…
oracknows | February 11, 2013Those of us who dedicate considerable time and effort to combatting quackery generally do it because we think we're doing good. Certainly, I wouldn't spend so much time nearly every evening blogging the way I do if I didn't think so. It's true that I also enjoy it, but if I were doing this just for enjoyment I'm sure I could manage to find other topics that I could write about. In actuality, way back in deepest darkest beginnings of this blog, I did write about a lot of other things. My skeptical topics were more general in nature, encompassing not just medicine but evolution versus "…
oracknows | February 10, 2013Epigenetics. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I realize I overuse that little joke, but I can't help but think that virtually every time I see advocates of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's known more commonly now, "integrative medicine" discussing epigenetics. All you have to do to view mass quantities of misinterpretation of the science of epigenetics is to type the word into the "search" box of a website like Mercola.com or NaturalNews.com, and you'll be treated to large numbers of articles touting the latest…
oracknows | February 4, 2013Gary Null loves me! He really loves me!
Well, maybe not Gary Null, but Sayer Ji. You remember Sayer Ji, don't you? He's the guy who runs GreenMedInfo.com who showed up on my skeptical radar when he claimed that vaccines are "transhumanism" that subverts evolution. (Seriously, you can't make stuff like this up.) On another occasion, he attacked Bill Gates for funding projects to monitor the antivaccine movement, and went wild attacking such activities as though they were a bad thing. Most recently, Ji launched a spectacularly inept attack on evidence-based medicine in which he tried to…
oracknows | January 25, 2013Three years ago, the influenza season was a really big deal. The reason, of course, is that the 2009-2010 flu season was dominated by fears of the H1N1 strain, so much so that it was a rare flu season that there were two recommended vaccines, one for the originally expected strains of flu and one for the H1N1 strain. Fortunately for all of us, the H1N1 fear mostly fizzled, but public health officials were in a bad place. Under-react, and if the pandemic turned out to be as bad as the worst case scenarios predicted before the pandemic, and they'd be crucified for not having done everything…
oracknows | January 17, 2013I sense another disturbance in the antivaccine Force.
Yes, I realize that it was just a couple of days ago that I sensed a previous disturbance rippling through the antivaccine Force. That's when antivaccinationists brought David Kirby out of mothballs from whatever journalistic slime pit he's currently residing in to use every trick at his disposal to convince you that somehow the government has compensated two families of children for vaccine-induced autism when in fact he's playing the same game he's always played: Claiming that if any child who's ever been compensated by the National…
oracknows | January 1, 2013That Dr. Mehmet Oz uses his show to promote quackery of the vilest sort is no longer in any doubt. I was reminded yet again of this last week when I caught a rerun of one of his shows from earlier this season, when he gazed in wonder at the tired old cold reading schtick used by all "psychic mediums" from time immemorial, long before the current crop of celebrity psychic mediums, such as John Edward, Sylvia Browne, and the "Long Island Medium" Theresa Caputo, discovered how much fame and fortune they could accrue by scamming the current generation of the credulous. Speaking of Theresa Caputo…
oracknows | December 30, 2012Homeopathy amuses me. Homeopaths amuse me as well, which is why I'm resurrecting this post. It was originally published elsewhere a few years ago and somehow never crossposted here. So if it seems a bit dated, fear not; Orac hasn't fired up his Tarial cells and managed to go back in time. Now, I realize that lately, due to my work schedule, I've had a tendency to crosspost too much between this blog and my other less "insolent" blogging locale. I know that and plan to try to do much less of it in 2013.
But it's not 2013, and I'm still sort of on vacation.
Besides, I have a very good reason to…
oracknows | November 23, 2012Whenever I blog about atrocities against science like the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I'm frequently asked how just such an edifice designed to promote pseudoscience could have come to be as a full-fledged center in the National Institutes of Health. The answer is simple and boils down to woo-loving legislators. In the case of NCCAM, the primary driving force to create it, promote it from an office (originally the Office of Unconventional Medicine and then later renamed the Office of Alternative Medicine) to a full center, and protect it from all…
oracknows | November 20, 2012I've made no secret of my opinion of a certain "alternative" cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, of the infamous Burzynski Clinic. When last we left Burzynski, his propagandist lapdog bootlicker documentary film maker Eric Merola was most unhappy with bloggers like me for having the temerity to tell it like it is when it comes to his film subject's activities. Merola, you might recall, was responsible for Burzynski the Movie – Cancer Is a Serious Business, which I characterized as pure propaganda so incompetently made that it would make Leni Riefenstahl blush. After a couple of…
oracknows | November 15, 2012One characteristic of cranks, quacks, and pseudoscience boosters is a love-hate relationship with science. They desperately crave the respectability and validation that science confers. In the case of medicine, they want to be seen as evidence- and science-based. On the other hand, they hate science because it just won't given them what they want: Confirmation and validation. The reasons, of course, are obvious; their preferred ideas about disease and modalities to treat it are not rooted in science. Rather, they're usually based in either prescientific concepts of how the human body works…
oracknows | November 14, 2012It wasn't so long ago (less than a week, actually), that I noticed what I referred to as a paean to the quackery known as naturopathy. It appeared—where else?—on that wretched hive of scum and quackery known at The Huffington Post. It was even entitled My Love Affair with Naturopathy. Not unexpectedly, this very article revealed just what quacks naturopaths are, as it told the story of a woman with vague symptoms, "messed up menstrual cycles," and other complaints who went to a naturopath and was blown away by the "personalized" attention and even more happy that this particular naturopath…