quackery
oracknows | October 17, 2012As much as I write about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia, there is one particular area that is being increasingly invaded by such quackery. It's an area that you wouldn't necessarily expect, although anyone who's read The Men Who Stare at Goats might not be so shocked. Yes, I'm referring to the military, and, as I've documented time and time again, increasingly our men and women in uniform are being subjected to abject quackery. What they need and deserve is the very best science-based medicine that we as a nation have to offer. Instead, what more and more of…
oracknows | October 16, 2012I take back all those nice things I used to say about Nancy Snyderman.
There's no doubt that she "gets it" about vaccines and, for the most part, even though she does occasionally go overboard, and her understanding of the issues involved in the use of various vaccines is anything but nuanced. I used to think that she "got it" with respect to SBM, but then I saw her recent segment on "complementary" medicine on NBC News the other night. Here's part one, which aired Monday night:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
The very introduction made me groan,…
oracknows | October 11, 2012And now for something completely different...
Well, not really. It's a little different, but regular readers will soon recognize it as a variation on the same old theme. One topic I've been writing about since the very beginning of this blog is the alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial, or, more specifically, the breast cancer cure testimonial. Indeed, one of the very first (perhaps the very first) of my "classic" Orac-length deconstructions was about this very topic. It's a topic that's come up again and again, even quite recently. To make a long story short, many breast cancer cure…
denialism | October 1, 2012Slate has an interesting article about Romney campaign mailings that appear to contain buzzwords for chronic Lyme disease advocates in Virginia. Romney's plan for Lyme disease includes these two points:
IMPROVE SYNERGY
Ensure that government agencies have an open line of communication and work with patients, researchers, doctors, and businesses in an objective, comprehensive manner.
SUPPORT TREATMENT
Encourage increased options for the treatment of Lyme Disease and provide local physicians with protection from lawsuits to ensure they can treat the disease with the aggressive antibiotics…
oracknows | September 18, 2012As hard as it is for me to believe when I look back at it, I've been writing about the antivaccine movement now for more than seven years here on this blog and combatting it online for at least a decade now. I like to think that over the years my response has evolved somewhat. Back in the beginning, I used to be a bit more—shall we say?—insolent in dealing with antivaccinationists. It's an easy thing to do because so much of what antivaccinationists write and say is just so darned idiotic. Indeed, even today, I still have a tendency to slip back into my old ways when an antivaccinationist…
oracknows | September 2, 2012For my international readers, it's a holiday here in the U.S. That means I plan on taking it easy, which means I've decided on doing, in essence, a "rerun." I chose this particular rerun based on my post from last Thursday. I thought that rerunning this particular post is a good reminder of what the cost of eschewing science-based therapy for breast cancer can be, and that price is horrible. This particular post dates back to 2006; so, if you haven't been reading the awesomeness that is my blog that long, it's new to you. I'll be back with new Insolence tomorrow.
I've written before about how…
oracknows | August 28, 2012If there's one thing that practitioners of pseudoscientific medicine crave more than anything else, it's respectability. Believing that science-based medicine is corrupt and that their woo is as good or better, they delude themselves into thinking that they can function as well or better than primary care doctors practice and therefore should be given the same privileges that physicians are granted. To them, it makes sense. On any objective basis, however, it does not. The reason is simple. The two most common "disciplines" that seek the same scope of practice as primary care doctors are…
oracknows | August 22, 2012Since I seem to be on a roll the last few days discussing cancer quackery, I thought I'd just go with it at least one more day. Frequently, when I get on these rolls laying down the Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful, over antivaccine quackery I start whining about how I need to change topics, but not this time around, not this topic. It takes a lot more than what I've posted lately to make me feel as though I need a change of pace. Besides, for whatever reason, the blog fodder is flying at me fast and furious, whether it be the dubious testimonial I discussed yesterday, yet…
oracknows | August 14, 2012Over the years, I've often likened non-science-based medical belief systems to religion. It's not a hard argument to make. Religion involves believing in things that can't be proven scientifically; indeed, religion makes a virtue out of ignoring the evidence and accepting various beliefs on faith alone. Similarly, alternative medicine frequently tells you that you have to believe in the therapy, dedicate yourself completely to it, in order for it to work. Of course, as I've also mentioned before, it is that insistence on belief and total commitment shared by religion and alternative medicine…
oracknows | August 13, 2012Well, I'm back.
It's always a bit weird to try to get back into the swing of things after even just a week off and even when during that week I didn't actually stop blogging but merely slowed down a lot and succeeded (mostly) in restricting what little blogging I did to brief posts. (Yes, I know there was one exception.) Even so, I did ignore a fair number of things that normally would have been either the subject of one of my scintillating detailed scientific analyses or the target of a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence. Usually when I get back from a vacation I like to ease…
oracknows | August 3, 2012Let's travel back in time fifteen years.
It's a time that, for me, at times seems as though it were just yesterday while at other times it seems like truly ancient history. Back then, certainly, I wasn't the blogging powerhouse that I am today. I didn't even know what blogging was because it was so much in its infancy that few people knew what it was. In fact, it was only around 14 years ago that I first discovered Usenet, that vast, sprawling, brawling assortment of discussion groups where I cut my skeptical teeth, so to speak, discovering, as I did, alt.revisionism (often abbrievated a.r.…
oracknows | July 24, 2012At least half the time, it seems that when I take on a relatively new topic with every intention of just doing one post about it I somehow end up doing more than one post. I don't know why that is. It just seems to happen. Sometimes, I find something related to but sufficiently different that interests me, sometimes seemingly quite at random. Sometimes someone responds to my post in such a way that I feel obliged to answer. Sometimes, readers make me aware of variations on a theme, so to speak, either in the comments or by e-mailing me links. That's what happened this time.
Yesterday I posted…
oracknows | July 23, 2012Many are the forms of quackery to which autistic children are subjected to. It's amazing just how many dubious and dangerous treatments (dubbed "biomedical treatments" or "autism biomed") parents will try in an effort to "recover" their children. Perhaps the most shocking of this quackery that I've recently covered is something called "miracle mineral solution" (MMS), which is in reality nothing more than a powerful bleach. Parents make their autistic children drink diluted MMS, bathe in it, and even take bleach as an enema. They try to claim that what they are using is no more powerful than…
oracknows | July 20, 2012A couple of weeks ago, I had a bit of fun with a rather clueless chiropractor by the name of J.C. Smith (JCS), who decided to take a swipe at an organization with which I'm associated, namely the Institute for Science in Medicine (ISM). It was such an inept attack, filled with misinformation, pseudoscience, and logical fallacies, that it was what I like to call a "teachable moment" when it comes to chiropractors and chiropractic. Even more amusingly, JCS promised at the end of his post lambasting ISM as a new "medical mafia" that he would be writing a followup post. I could hardly wait. The…
oracknows | July 15, 2012Like so many other skeptics, I just returned from TAM, which, despite all the conflict and drama surrounding it this year, actually turned out to be a highly enjoyable experience for myself and most people I talked to. As I've been doing the last few years, I joined up with Steve Novella and other proponents of science-based medicine to do a workshop about how difficult it is to find decent health information on the Internet, and how the "University of Google" all too frequently puts quackery on the same level as reliable sources of medical information because all that matters for most search…
oracknows | June 29, 2012Remember California Bill AB 2109? I've written about it at least a couple of times before. In fact, for some reason, the comment section of this post on AB 2109 suddenly come alive again a couple of days ago, with antivaccinationists infiltrating it, much to the annoyance of my regular commenters. It turns out that the reason was that a couple of days ago AB 2109 came up for discussion in the California Senate Health Committee (and passed to be sent out to the full Senate for a vote), after having passed the California House a couple of months ago. I also now know why antivaccinationists…
oracknows | June 27, 2012And now for something completely different.
Except that it isn't really. I say that it isn't really different because, although this post will seem to be about politics, in reality it will be about a common topic on this blog: Anti-science. And where is this anti-science? Sadly, it's in the platform of a major party of one of the largest states in the country. It also meshes with the anti-science inherent in a lot of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and all comes together in one place: The proposed 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas. It's all there, as you…
oracknows | June 19, 2012A couple of months ago, a reader sent me an article that really disturbed me. In fact, I had originally been planning to write about it not long after I received it. However, as I've mentioned before, when it comes to blogging, I'm a bit like Dug the Talking Dog from the movie Up in that I'm easily distracted. Unlike Dug, what distracts me aren't squirrels, but rather bright, shiney pieces of pseudoscience, quackery, paranormal, or otherwise weird nonsense. Sometimes after I'm distracted I come back to the topic I had originally wanted to blog about. Sometimes I don't. Or, sometimes (like…
oracknows | June 15, 2012Naturopathy is at least 99% woo. That has to be said at the outset. Naturopaths might brag about all the science they take in naturopathy school, claiming that it's as much as MDs take. Even if that were true, the question is not how many hours of basic science naturopaths take, but rather what's taught in those hours and, more importantly, what's taught in the clinical hours. For instance, given that you can't have naturopathy without homeopathy, it implies that what's taught in basic science classes in naturopathy school allows room for the incredible magical quackery that is homeopathy to…
oracknows | June 13, 2012Although I'm interested in skepticism in general, I have a tendency to gravitate towards one particular form of pseudoscience (alternative medicine) and, in particular, a certain kind of that particular form of pseudoscience, namely antivaccine quackery. However, as much as I keep returning to the antivaccine movement, I keep noticing just how much it shares with other forms of science denialism and pseudoscientific thinking. I was reminded of this when one of my readers e-mailed me a link to a Facebook group, Pro-Vax Quacks. I have no idea who's behind the group, but what I do know is that…