Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | July 5, 2011Darn it all!
I knew they'd find us out. I just knew it:
Actually, I'm happy. Our diversion has worked. While the conspiracy loons will be protesting the lesser of two meetings, the real work in crushing conspiracies and ensuring our world domination will be some 600 miles away in Las Vegas at The Amaz!ng Meeting 9.
A pity, though, that I and my fellow skeptical conspirators can't be two places at once. The discussions of toxic murder meters, mandated vaccines, aerial toxins, and starting perpetual wars in order to assure progress towards a World Government and Hitlerian New World Order…
oracknows | July 4, 2011Happy Independence Day, everyone!
Believe it or not, your normally blogorrheic host is taking this holiday off. For one thing, I have to work on my talk for the Science-Based Medicine workshop at The Amaz!ng Meeting 9 next week. For another thing, I have a fair amount of work for my actual job to do before tomorrow morning. So in the meantime I'll do what I like to call a "lazy blogger trick," namely to post an open thread. I'll also refer you to an excellent post by Mark Crislip about the difference between clinical thinking and critical thinking. It's such a good point that I might have to…
oracknows | July 1, 2011I know I've said it many, many times before, but it's something that, in my opinion at least, can't be repeated too often. Homeopathy is ridiculous. Arguably, it's the most ridiculous of "alternative" therapies ever conceived. And that's saying a lot. After all, among "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM), we have therapies in which people claim that they can tap into some sort of "universal source" and channel it into you for healing effect (reiki, a.k.a. faith healing based on Eastern mysticism instead of Christian beliefs); they can change the flow…
oracknows | June 30, 2011
Regular readers know that I'm a bit of a connoisseur of pareidolia, so much so that I even have a category devoted to it. For those not familiar with the concept, pareidolia is nothing more than seeing patterns in things. One of the most famous examples is seeing faces, animals, or other objects in clouds. Among the religious, a particularly common strain of pareidolia is to see Jesus or Mary in patterns on anything from pancakes, to sheet metal, to windows, to trees, to doors, to MRIs. Even Ikea isn't immune. I've even seen a story of Satan appearing on a bathroom tile and wondered if it…
oracknows | June 28, 2011It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns again today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll again post two about the same topic. Since I recently reran a really old post that started it all, I thought I'd follow up with the two additional posts about the same topic. This is the third one and…
oracknows | June 23, 2011Remember Michael Egnor?
I bet many of you do. If you were reading this blog three or four years ago, Dr. Egnor was a fairly regular target topic of my excretions of not-so-Respectful Insolence. The reason for that was, at the time, I was quite annoyed that a fellow surgeon could so regularly lay down such incredible blasts of pseudoscientific nonsense in the defense of his "intelligent design" creationism views. Back then he did this as a semi-regular blogger for a blog that is a propaganda outlet for the crank ID propagandists at Discovery Institute in much the same way that Age of Autism is…
oracknows | June 13, 2011Orac note: Grant season is in full swing, and that's what I spent my weekend doing: writing grants. Consequently, here's a rerun from, hard as it is to believe, four and a half years ago. It's the first appearance of one of the most hilarious "alt-med" attacks on science-based medicine I've ever seen, calling us "microfascists." Unfortunately, little has changed coming from CAM supporters in the nearly five years since I first applied some not-so-Respectful Insolence to this little chew toy of an article. Enjoy, I hope. Remember, if you haven't been reading at least four and a half years, it'…
oracknows | June 10, 2011It's been another rather rough week. Grant season is in full swing, and I'm busily writing away. As I get to the end of the week, I wondered: Should I be serious or should I post a bit of fluff? Given the crappy mood I've been in on and off (grants added to my usual responsibilities tend to do that to me), I know what I need, and I need it fast. I need it now. I need it bad. I need...some woo. And nothing but the best will do. But what? Over the years I've done Your Friday Dose of Woo, I thought I had seen it all. Well, not exactly all. Rather, it thought I had seen most of it, but…
oracknows | June 6, 2011I've frequently been critical fo the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) for funding dubious studies of pseudoscience and, in essence, promoting unscientific quackademic medicine (is there any other kind?) by giving it the patina of seeming respectability. I can't recall how many times I've seen promoters of woo justify their woo by saying, "Well, NCCAM funds it." As far as apologetics for quackademic medicine, "NCCAM does it" is right up there with "Harvard does it." Unfortunately, Harvard really does do it, as do too many other bastions of science-based…
oracknows | June 5, 2011How many times have I read or heard from believers in "alternative" medicine that some disease or other is caused by "toxins"? I honestly can't remember, but in alt-world, no matter what the disease or condition under discussion is, there's a good chance that sooner or later it will be linked to "toxins." It doesn't matter if it's cancer, autism, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, or that general malaise that comes over people who, as British comedians Mitchell and Webb put it, have more money than sense; somehow, some way, someone will invoke "toxins."
I was reminded of this obsession…
oracknows | June 1, 2011Even though I was only in junior high and high school back in the 1970s, because I was already turning into a science geek I remember Senator William Proxmire (D-WI). In particular, I remember his Golden Fleece awards. These were "awards" designed to highlight what he saw as wasteful government spending, targeting, for instance, the use of taxpayer funds to fly over 1,000 officers to a reunion of the Tailhook Association or financing the construction of an 800- foot limestone replica of the Great Wall of China in Bedford, Indiana. Others, although they sounded on the surface to be wasteful,…
oracknows | May 31, 2011I've caught some flak before over things I've written about the almost certainly nonexistent link between cell phones and cancer. Actually, it's not the kind of flak you probably think, unless you've been a long time reader and remember the relevant posts. You'd think it would be believers attacking the mean old skeptic for denying a link between cell phone radiation and cancer, thus making me (obviously) a shill for big telecom. Actually, it was flak from one physicist and at least a couple of skeptics, who didn't like that I actually left open the small possibility that it could be possible…
oracknows | May 24, 2011A couple of weeks ago, the anti-vaccine movement took a swing for the fences and, as usual, made a mighty whiff that produced a breeze easily felt in the bleachers. In brief, a crew of anti-vaccine lawyers named headed by Mary Holland, co-author of Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children, published a highly touted (by Generation Rescue and other anti-vaccine groups, that is) "study" claiming to "prove" that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) had actually compensated children for autism.…
oracknows | May 15, 2011First Oz, now this. Too bad Dr. Novella's appearance was so short:
At least they got Banachek to do a quick and dirty trial that helped to demonstrate that these bracelets do not work. Unfortunately, the power of belief is strong; several of the people who underwent the testing still wanted to fork over $30 for a cheap piece of plastic.
That is what skeptics are up against.
sa smith | May 15, 2011Amanda Marcotte, big internet name in skepticism and feminism just put up an article on The Guardian blag:
The soft underbelly of the right's hard abs
...
...
... I dont get it.
Or rather, I 'get it', but I find it distasteful, and I dont 'get' why she thought it was appropriate for her to post that.
At first, the June cover of Men's Health seems par for the course for a magazine that aims to stoke male anxieties about physical perfection to sell products to men the same way that the beauty industry has done to women for decades:
Umm... Its not a magazine about knitting or fly fishing. Its a…
sa smith | May 10, 2011I want you all to see an article I just found via Relative Risk Blog. Its about 'Chronic Lyme Disease'. About a young woman who was aggressively treated by a 'questionable' practitioner who had 'cured herself' of 'Chronic Lyme'. No one believes in 'Chronic Lyme'. 'Everyone' was 'against' this practitioner, while she insisted she 'KNEW' what she was talking about. Questionable tests. Off-label prescriptions. And this practitioner almost killed this young woman.
Janet Love and Dana Rosdahl come across as sincere in their belief that doctors routinely misdiagnose the disease, leading to…
oracknows | May 10, 2011As hard as it is for me to believe sometimes, I've been at this blogging biz a long time--well over six years now. However, I've been engaged, in one form or another, in combatting pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and crankery online since the late 1990s. Although I try hard not to fall into the same cognitive traps that a certain pediatrician to the stars does, namely considering my own anecdotal experience to be superior to controlled studies, that is not to say that personal experience is without value. At least, that's what I was thinking when I came across Steve Novella's post A failure to…
oracknows | May 9, 2011One theme that I keep revisiting again and again is not so much a question of the science behind medical therapies (although certainly I do discuss that issue arguably more than any other) but rather a question of why. Why is it that so many people cling so tenaciously to pseudoscience, quackery, and, frequently, conspiracy theories used by believers to justify why various pseudoscience and quackery are rejected by mainstream science and medicine? Certainly, I've touched on this issue before on several occasions, for example, with respect to the anti-vaccine movement, the claim that abortion…
sa smith | May 6, 2011Remember that shit supplement I wrote about just over a year ago, 'Gene-Eden'?
The FDA notified them that they have to stop saying their plant smoothie treats chronic viral infections and other STDs:
Dara Corrigan, JD, the FDA's associate commissioner for regulatory affairs, says the warning letters give the companies time to voluntarily comply with federal law. He says the agency will "continue to take aggressive enforcement action against firms that market false treatments or cures that may lead to significant public health consequences."
The companies have 15 days to notify the FDA of…
oracknows | May 5, 2011It's official now. The U.S. is on track to accumulate more cases of measles than it has seen in a decade:
The United States seems to be on track to have more measles cases than any year in more than a decade, with virtually all cases linked to other countries, including Europe where there's a big outbreak.
Already there have been 89 cases reported so far. The U.S. normally sees only about 50 cases of measles in a year thanks to vaccinations.
Health officials are reluctant to make predictions, but acknowledge the pace of reports is unusually hot.
"It's hard to say, but we're certainly getting…