Skepticism/Critical Thinking
CNBC publishes an antivaccine press release from the Weston A. Price Foundation and Leslie Manookian
oracknows | March 5, 2015One of the things I've noticed over the last decade of covering pseudoscience and quackery from a skeptical point of view is that no pseudoscientific trope ever really dies. This is particularly true of antivaccine tropes. No matter how many times this piece or that of antivaccine misinformation is slapped down, sooner or later it always resurfaces. Indeed, I remember one article that I've seen resurface on several occasions that inevitably bears a title that is some variation of a statement that a "new study vindicates Andrew Wakefield." Every time that article pops up, various antivaccine…
oracknows | March 4, 2015I hadn't planned on discussing the death of Jess Ainscough again, figuring two posts in a row were enough for now, barring new information. Besides, I was getting a little tired of the seemingly unending stream of her fans castigating me for being "insensitive" and saying it was "too soon" to discuss her death and wasn't sure I wanted to reawaken that discussion, which is only now finally dying down. This was a young Australian woman who was unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with a rare form of sarcoma at age 22 for which the only known treatment with a reasonable chance of providing her…
oracknows | March 2, 2015It's been a rather...interesting...weekend.
Friday, I noted the death of Jess Ainscough, a.k.a. "The Wellness Warrior," a young Australian woman who was unfortunate enough to develop epithelioid sarcoma, a rare cancer, at the age of 22. I've been blogging about her because after her doctors tried isolated limb perfusion with chemotherapy in an attempt to avoid an amputation of her left arm at the shoulder, her tumor recurred, after which she chose not to undergo amputation and instead to embrace the quackery known as Gerson therapy, which she did for over two years. By the time she finished…
oracknows | February 27, 2015Two months ago, I took note of a somewhat cryptic blog post by a young woman named Jess Ainscough. In Australia and much of the world, Ainscough was known as the Wellness Warrior. She was a young woman who developed an epithelioid sarcoma in 2008 and ended up choosing "natural healing" to treat her cancer. Among the "natural healing" modalities touted by the Wellness Warrior included that quackery of quackeries, the Gerson protocol, complete with coffee enemas and everything. She even did videos explaining how to administer coffee enemas and posted them on YouTube, although that video is now…
oracknows | February 26, 2015Poor Andy Wakefield.
Beginning in the late 1990s until around six years ago, Andy was the premiere "vaccine skeptic" in the world. His 1998 case series published in The Lancet linking bowel problems in autistic children to the measles vaccine, the one where in the paper itself he was careful not to blame the MMR vaccine for autism but elsewhere was not so shy, launched a campaign of fear and loathing for the MMR vaccine that continues to this day. In his heyday, Wakefield was quite the figure, showing up on the media everywhere, treated with undeserved respect by much of the tabloid press and…
oracknows | February 25, 2015Every so often, it's good to post some heartening news regarding quackery. After all, after a decade of blogging about this, preceded by five years in the trenches of Usenet battling quackery and Holocaust denial, sometimes it's hard for me not to become depressed. After all, there are times when it really does feel as though we're fighting a hopeless battle for rationality and science against unreason and harmful quackery. It's a battle worth fighting, but I'm not laboring under any delusions that it will be won in my life time or even in the lifetimes of anyone currently alive. The various…
oracknows | February 24, 2015With the Disneyland measles outbreak still going strong and striking far more unvaccinated than vaccinated, it's not surprising that a discussion has begun in some states about lax policies that permit religious and/or philosophical exemptions. In Oregon, for example, the legislature is considering SB442, a bill apparently originally intended to provide a technical fix to the process for obtaining philosophical exemptions to vaccine mandates by giving parents deadlines to submit the required documentation for non-medical exemptions, but the antivaccine troops became totally riled up when the…
oracknows | February 22, 2015Oh, goody. Here's something we didn't need here in the US. While Australian skeptics have successfully been rallying to put a stop to a series of lectures from American antivaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny, we're going to have to put up with a far bigger name in quackery showing up right here in the good ol' U. S. of A. I'm referring to His Royal Highness, the Quacktitioner Royal, Prince Charles, the next King of England. Yes, in March he and Camilla will be here on a four day tour that will include a trip to Louisville to give the keynote address to a symposium on health and nature on March…
oracknows | February 20, 2015
You remember Dr. Bob, don't you?
I'm referring, of course, to Robert "Dr. Bob" Sears, the Capistrano Beach, CA pediatrician who's arguably the most famous of the antivaccine pediatricians who have been spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about vaccines. (Sorry, Dr. Jay, but, regardless of your being Jenny McCarthy's son's pediatrician, I'd bet that more people have heard of Dr. Bob than have heard of you.) Dr. Bob has achieved this fame/notoriety based on his book, The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for your Child, which is chock full of exaggerations about the dangers of…
oracknows | February 18, 2015
Ever since the Disneyland measles outbreak hit high gear last month and permeated the national consciousness, the antivaccine movement has, justifiably, been on the defensive. We've been treated to the spectacle of a truly despicable cardiologist spewing antivaccine nonsense with an added dollop of contempt for parents of children with cancer who are worried about the degradation of herd immunity by non-vaccinating parents driving vaccine rates down, leading to pockets of low vaccine uptake. We've had antivaccinationists likening vaccine mandates to human trafficking and rape. Then, of…
oracknows | February 18, 2015
It often comes as a surprise to proponents of alternative medicine and critics of big pharma that I'm a big fan of John Ioannidis. Evidence of this can easily be found right here on this very blog just by entering Ioannidis' name into the search box. Indeed, my first post about an Ioannidis paper is nearly a decade old now. These posts were about one of Ioannidis' most famous papers, this one published in JAMA and entitled Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research. It was a study that suggested that at least 1/3 of highly cited clinical trials may either…
oracknows | February 16, 2015
If there's one thing that's become clear to me over the years about acupuncture, it's that it's nothing more than a theatrical placebo. Many are the times that I've asked: Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Most recently, I asked this question in 2012. What science-based medicine answers is yes. However, there's a large contingent of physicians under the sway of practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) who have fallen under the spell of that theatrical placebo, leading to a whole subdiscipline of quackademic medicine in which…
oracknows | February 15, 2015 Baratunde Thurston and Zanny Minton Bedoes react to a particularly ignorant bit of antivaccine misinformation by Bill Maher on Real Time With Bill Maher. (February 13, 2015)
I really don't want Mondays to be come "let's refute and make fun of the conspiratorial antivaccine nonsense Bill Maher said on his show Friday night." I really don't. However, I figured that I might have to devote Monday to that one more time this week after Maher really let his antivaccine freak flag fly again for the first time in five years on his February 6 show. As a result of the criticism, Maher apologists…
oracknows | February 13, 2015If there's one good thing about the ongoing Disneyland measles outbreak that is continuing to spread, if there can be a "good thing" about an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease that didn't have to happen, it's that it's put the antivaccine movement on the defensive. They are definitely feeling the heat. Their reaction to that heat can range from ever more vigorously proclaiming that they are "not antivaccine" in a desperate bid to convince the unwary and those not familiar with the antivaccine movement that they are not antivaccine, all the while softening their antivaccine tropes…
oracknows | February 10, 2015Sometimes, in order to understand advocates of pseudoscience, such as antivaccinationists, it's a useful exercise to look at their most extreme elements. Admittedly, in focusing on such loons, one does take the risk of generalizing the nuts to everyone a bit much, but on the other hand I've often found that the extremists are basically like the less loony versions on steroids. The advantage, to me, is that they are unconcerned (for the most part) with hiding the craziness at the root of their beliefs. While, for instance, SafeMinds of the merry band of antivaccinationists at Age of Autism (…
oracknows | February 8, 2015
Note added 2/10/2015: I've posted a followup in response to the skeptics who defend Bill Maher.
A couple of weeks ago, I noted the return of the antivaccine wingnut side of Bill Maher, after a (relative) absence of several years, dating back, most likely, to the thorough spanking he endured for spouting off his antivaccine pseudoscience during the H1N1 pandemic. This well-deserved mockery included Bob Costas taunting him on his own show with a sarcastic, "Oh, come on, Superman!" in response to his apparent belief that diet and lifestyle alone would protect him from the flu, as well as Chris…
oracknows | February 5, 2015
Well, the ongoing multistate measles outbreak that's been in the news for the last few weeks continues apace, which means I can't seem to stay away from the issue for more than a couple of days. For instance, yesterday I learned that five babies at a Chicago-area day care have been diagnosed with the measles. All the babies are under a year old and therefore too young to have received the MMR vaccine yet. At this point, I'm betting that most likely the baby who brought the measles to the KinderCare Day Care with this measles outbreak got it from an older unvaccinated sibling, but time will…
oracknows | February 5, 2015
Yesterday was a very strange day, at least on the Internet.
I really should learn to remove Twitter from my iPhone on Wednesdays. Why? Wednesdays tend to be my administrative days. I'm not in clinic seeing patients nor am I in the operating room. That's why Wednesday tends to be one of the two days a week when I write grants, do administrative work, and meet with my lab people, among other miscellaneous tasks, such as working on upcoming presentations. So I tend to spend most of the day on Wednesdays sitting in front of my computer, and I'm easily distracted by Twitter or other things…
oracknows | January 21, 2015
Poor, poor, pitiful Dr. Bob.
For those of you not familiar with him, I'm referring, of course, to Robert "Dr. Bob" Sears, MD, the antivaccine-sympathetic (or, more appropriately, antivaccine-pandering) pediatrician in Capistrano Beach, CA (between Los Angeles and San Diego in Orange County) known for his Vaccine Book, a veritable font of antivaccine misinformation gussied up as a "reasonable" middle ground. Too bad it's not.
In any case, in the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak, Dr. Bob has found himself under a lot of criticism, along with our "good buddy," the other famous…
oracknows | January 14, 2015
Brief Orac follow up note, January 21, 2015: Antivaccine pediatrician "Dr. Bob" Sears responds to his patients' parents' concerns about the Disneyland measles outbreak. Hilarity ensues.
Last week, the self-proclaimed "happiest place on earth" wasn't so happy.
You've probably figured out that what I'm referring to is the latest measles outbreak. Some of you have been talking about it in the comments, and I keep seeing news about it. Finally, I couldn't resist applying a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence to the whole situation. I realize that some of you might have seen this at a certain…