Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | December 3, 2015I originally wasn't going to write about this particular post, but the mass shooting in San Bernardino yesterday led me to change my mind. For those of you who either aren't in the US or were somehow cut off from media for the last 18 hours or so, yesterday a heavily armed man and woman dressed in body armor, who turned out to be a married couple, entered a conference center at Inland Regional Center, a sprawling facility that provides services for thousands of people with disabilities. There, at an annual holiday party for the San Bernardino County Public Health Department, Syed Rizwan…
oracknows | December 1, 2015Of all the slick woo peddlers out there, one of the most famous (and most annoying) is Deepak Chopra. Indeed, he first attracted a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence a mere 10 months after this blog started, when Chopra produced the first of many rants against nasty "skeptics" like me that I've deconstructed over the years. Eventually, the nonsensical nature of his pseudo-profound blatherings inspired me to coin a term to describe it: Choprawoo. Unfortunately, far too many people find Deepak Chopra's combination of mystical sounding pseudo-profundity, his invocation of "cosmic consciousness"…
oracknows | November 25, 2015If there's one thing I've learned about the antivaccine movement over the decade-plus that I've been following and commenting on it, it's that there are many flavors of antivaccine beliefs. These range from the "loud and proud" (and, invariably, incredibly stupid) antivaccine activists who aren't afraid of the label. They'll tell you that they're antivaccine and back that assertion up by demonizing vaccines as not just ineffective but downright toxic and deadly. On the other end of the spectrum are what I like to refer to as "vaccine averse," parents who have heard the message of the…
oracknows | November 24, 2015It is an article of faith among the antivaccine movement that vaccines are degrading the health of our children, such that vaccines cause autism, asthma, diabetes, and a number of other chronic diseases. You won't have to look far on most antivaccine websites to find claims that today's children are the sickest in history and insinuations, if not outright statements, that vaccines are at least part ofthe cause. If you've been following the antivaccine movement as long as I have (more than a decade) or even if you've only been following it one tenth as long, you are probably aware that one of…
oracknows | November 23, 2015As a surgeon and skeptic, I find neurosurgeon turned presidential candidate Ben Carson to be particularly troubling. I realize that I've said this before, but it's hard for me not to revisit his strange case given that the New York Times just ran a rather revealing profile of him over the weekend, part of which included Dr. Carson answering criticism for the really dumb things he's said about vaccines, evolution, and the like. People like Ben Carson are useful examples of how highly intelligent people who are incredibly competent in one area can also demonstrate unbelievable ignorance in…
oracknows | November 20, 2015One of the key principles of skepticism, particularly in medicine, is that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. I emphasize the word "necessarily" because sometimes skeptics go a bit too far and say that correlation does not equal causation. I myself used to phrase it that way for a long time. However, sometimes correlation does equal causation. However, much, if not most, of the time it does not. So how do we tell the difference between when correlation might well equal causation and when it does not? Science, of course, and critical thinking. Science is the main reason that we…
oracknows | November 19, 2015I didn't think I'd be discussing Dr. David Katz again so soon after the last time. In fact, when blog bud Mark Crislip (who clearly hates me and wants me to pop an aneurysm or have a heart attack, given how often he sends me links to articles as infuriating as this) sent me a link to Dr. Katz's latest article, "Cleaning the House of Medicine", published—where else?—in The Huffington Post, that home for "reputable" quack-friendly bloviation since 2005, when I first read the article, my first reaction was that Katz must surely be trolling supporters of science-based medicine. At first, I wasn't…
oracknows | November 17, 2015Now that's what I'm talking about! Yesterday, the Justice Department announced criminal charges and lawsuits against the sellers of several supplements! This is the ort of thing that is long overdue—incredibly so, in fact. Before I get to this specific case, let's discuss a little background.
One of the regular topics I write about, both on this blog and at my not-so-super-secret other group blog, is how supplement manufacturers take advantage of the lax regulation of dietary supplements in this country. It's a problem in our laws that we've had since the supplement industry and its lapdogs…
oracknows | November 15, 2015It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of naturopathy. It is, as my good bud Kimball Atwood has said, a prescientific system of medicine rooted in vitalism, the idea that there is a "life energy" and a "healing power of nature." Naturopaths invoke very simplistic concepts to explain the cause of disease, such as "toxins," widespread food allergies, gluten, imbalances in qi (the life force energy), and many other pseudoscientific principles. To give you an idea of the kind of pseudoscientific quackery naturopathy encompasses, consider this: You can't have naturopathy without homeopathy, which…
oracknows | November 13, 2015The question of whether it is worthwhile to debate cranks, quacks, and advocates of pseudoscience has long been a contentious issue in the skeptic community. Those of you who've been reading my posts for a while know that I've always come down on the side that it is not a good idea One thing I've learned in my more than a decade of blogging, both here and at my non-pseudonymous other blog, is that advocates of pseudoscience love public debates. Indeed, whenever you see a skeptic agree to a public debate with an advocate of pseudoscience, it's a damned sure bet that it wasn't the skeptic who…
oracknows | November 11, 2015I've used my current pseudonym since at least the late 1990s, first on Usenet and then on the first incarnation of this blog. Not surprisingly in retrospect (although it surprised me at the time), people who didn't like me began trying back in the 1990s to "unmask" me. It began with Holocaust deniers. No, I'm not trying to Godwin this post; it really did begin with Holocaust deniers because, as longtime readers know, my "gateway drug" to skepticism was refuting the lies and misinformation of Holocaust deniers. So, round about the turn of the millennium, a group of Holocaust deniers managed to…
oracknows | November 8, 2015David Katz doesn't much like skeptics, particularly those of us who question the value of "integrative medicine." In fairness, I can't say that I much blame him. We have been very critical of his writings and talks over the years to my criticism of his statement advocating a "more fluid concept of evidence" more than once, to my pointing out that his arguments frequently boil down to a false dichotomy of either abandoning science or abandoning patients.
Last week, my friend Jann Bellamy discussed an unfortunate special supplement of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine (AJPM)…
oracknows | November 6, 2015As a surgeon, I find Ben Carson particularly troubling. By pretty most reports, he was a skilled neurosurgeon who practiced for three decades, rising to the chief of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. Yet, when he ventures out of the field of neurosurgery—even out of his own medical specialty—he routinely lays down some of the dumbest howlers I've ever heard. For example, he denies evolution, but, even worse, he's been a shill for a dubious supplement company, Mannatech. Worse still, when called out for his relationship with Mannatech in the last Republican debate, Carson lied through his teeth…
oracknows | November 5, 2015I've been at this blogging thing for more than a decade now. Looking back on those years, I find it incredible that I've lasted this long. For one thing, I still marvel that there are apparently thousands of people out there who still like to read my nearly daily musings (or, as George Carlin would call them, brain droppings) after all these years. More importantly, being a public advocate for science is a rough business, as I've documented over the years. Back when I first started out, I was completely pseudonymous and anonymous. I kept my real name relatively secret. It was less than five…
oracknows | November 1, 2015Before yesterday, I had never heard of Ben Swann. Apparently he is the new anchor for the early evening news broadcast of the local Atlanta CBS affiliate, having joined the station in June. Apparently he is also prone to antivaccine conspiracy theories, which is a very bad thing to be prone to as a reporter or anyone working in the news media. I came to learn of Swann because of an article that looks on the verge of going viral (given that relatives have e-mailed me asking me about it) entitled CBS Reporter Ben Swann Tells the Truth About CDC Vaccine Cover-Up. Of course, I can't help but…
oracknows | October 30, 2015When I wrote about YouYou Tu, the Chinese scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her successful identification, isolation, purification, and validation of Artemisinin, an antimalarial medication that was quite effective. It was also derived from an herbal remedy used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which has led a fair number of TCM advocates to portray this Nobel Prize as a "validation" or "vindication" of TCM. It wasn't. Nor was it a validation of naturopathy or herbalism, as has been claimed. It was a validation of the good, old-fashioned science-based…
oracknows | October 28, 2015No doubt, regular readers are probably somewhat surprised that I didn't discuss the antivaccine rally scheduled to be held in Atlanta last weekend that I wrote about last week. As you might recall, this rally consisted of two crappy tastes that taste crappy together, namely Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the antivaccine movement together with the Nation of Islam. Given that the Nation of Islam, besides being a truly crank religion on its own, of late has gotten very cozy with the Church of Scientology, thus amplifying the crank factor by orders of magnitude (at least).
Readers not familiar with…
oracknows | October 27, 2015I'm a clinician, but I'm actually also a translational scientist. It's not uncommon for those of us in medicine involved in some combination of basic and clinical research to argue about exactly what that means. The idea is translational science is supposed to be the process of "translating" basic science discoveries into the laboratory into medicine, be it in the form of drugs, treatments, surgical procedures, laboratory tests, diagnostic tests, or anything else that physicians use to diagnose and treat human disease. Trying to straddle the two worlds, to turn discoveries in basic science…
oracknows | October 26, 2015I like to point out from time to time that arguably the most striking difference between science-based medicine (and the evidence-based medicine from which we distinguish it) and alternative medicine, "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), or (as it's called now) "integrative medicine" is a concerted effort to change practice for the better based on science and evidence. In other words, in SBM, we are continually doing studies to improve practice. These studies take on two general forms: Comparing new treatments with old to determine if the new treatments work better and, as has…
oracknows | October 23, 2015I consider posts like the one I'm writing now to be public service, an obligation. There are times when I don't want to do them, when they become so sadly, depressingly repetitive in overall outline (and, unfortunately, likely outcome) that it takes an effort to begin. However, given that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and as a result these sorts of stories seem to pop out of the woodwork this time of year, I feel I must. It doesn't matter that I just discussed another one of these cases a mere month ago. This time around, the article appears (as is so frequently the case) in The…