Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | February 26, 2010I realize that there are two huge target-rich articles out there that my readers have been clamoring for me to comment on. First, there's a particularly silly and simplistic article by Nicholas Kristof about how it's supposedly the "toxins" causing autism (an article in which he apparently doesn't realize that Current Opinions in Pediatrics is not really a peer-reviewed journal but rather publishes review articles by invitation), and then there's a fawning TIME Magazine article bout Jenny McCarthy. When two such--shall we say?--target-rich articles appear on the same day, I'd be falling all…
oracknows | February 24, 2010I have to admit, this one made me chuckle.
In an earlier post today, in which I expressed my outrage at animal rights terrorists targeting an investigator's children for harassment at their school, I asked the following question:
That reminds me: Where were these animal rights loons when "Andrew Wakefield was torturing baby Macacque monkeys in the name of horrendously bad science designed to be used as a "made for court" study against vaccine manufacturers?
Paul Browne responded in the comments:
Perhaps crank magnetism also acts as a force field that protects cranks from other cranks.
I…
oracknows | February 20, 2010The news is finally filtering out to the rest of the world. As I pointed out a few days ago Dr. Steven Laureys admitted that Rom Houben, the unfortunate victim of a car crash that left him in what had been diagnosed as a persistent vegetative state, was in fact not able to communicate through the woo known as facilitated communication. This came as no surprise to anyone who has followed FC over the years. In fact, what had come as a surprise is that Dr. Laureys could have been so easily taken in by pseudoscience that had been so thoroughly debunked in the 1990s. To his credit, though, after a…
oracknows | February 17, 2010I happened to be listening to the Holocaust Denial On Trial podcast yesterday, specifically this episode which is a recording of a speech given by Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt about Holocaust denial and her experiences being sued for libel in Britain by arch Holocaust denier David Irving, who, much like the British Chiropractic Association taking advantage of the U.K.'s highly plaintiff-friendly libel laws to sue Simon Singh for libel now, took advantage of those same libel laws back in the late 1990s to sue Deborah Lipstadt. In the speech, she takes a position that I have argued on…
oracknows | February 13, 2010The utter discrediting and disgrace of Andrew Wakefield, first by the judgment of the General Medical Council against him and then by the retraction of the crown jewel of his respectability his 1998 Lancet paper that sparked the modern anti-vaccine movement and launched a thousand autism quacks. The reaction of the anti-vaccine loons was very predictable, with Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey producing a hilariously paranoid conspiracy theory and J.B. Handley following suit with more monkey business. Truly, the downfall of their hero, which has been a long time in coming but has finally arrived…
oracknows | February 12, 2010It's been a busy week between blogging about Andrew Wakefield and covering the Winkler County Nurse trial, which ended with the jury's acquitting Anne Mitchell, RN after less than an hour of deliberation. Consequently, I'm a bit tired today. Fortunately, there's the mail bag, the perfect lazy blogging tool that will allow me to generate an amusing post in mere minutes, given the sheer hilarity of the "feedback" I'm about to show you. While it may be true that PZ gets the best crank mail, I do get my share.
Remember how I blogged about Dr. Arafiles, the doctor whose chummy relationship with…
oracknows | February 11, 2010
"Would you like to touch my monkey? Touch him! Love him!"
J. B. Handley wants to touch see Andrew Wakefield's monkeys.
How do I know this? Well, there's just the little matter of his entitling his most recent excretion of flaming stupidity Show me the monkeys! and repeating "Show me the monkeys!" eleven times in the course of his post. My guess is that J.B. was trying to get a vibe going, perhaps like a preacher giving a sermon with cadences leading up to repeating the same phrase over and over again, with the intended effect of getting the audence to repeat the phrase when he says it, with…
oracknows | February 4, 2010I realize I complain periodically about when I get into what seems to me to be a rut in which I'm writing pretty much only about anti-vaccine lunacy. This is just such a week, when the news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, first with Andrew Wakefield's being found to have behaved unethically and dishonestly by the British General Medical Council, only to be followed up a few days later with the news that the editors of The Lancet had retracted his 1998 paper, the paper that started the MMR scare in the U.K. and launched a thousand autism quacks. Meanwhile, the cranks…
oracknows | January 31, 2010This may be a bit over the top, but it does rather point out what is in effect done when journalists lazily present "both sides" of issues that don't really have two sides, at least not two sides that are anywhere in the same universe as far as scientific validity:
I do rather think that they could have found a better example for "Western" versus "alternative" medicine. That part of the video was actually pretty dumb and, quite frankly, painfully unfunny. Come on! A Hulda Clark parody, where the alt-med practitioner claims that all cancer is caused by a liver fluke and that it can be cured…
oracknows | January 29, 2010I've sort of alluded to it, but grant fever took over the last couple of days as the deadline approaches. Unfortunately, it happened right around the time when the GMC ruling on Andrew Wakefield came down and came down hard on him and his unethical behavior. Oh, well, as they say, it looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. In any case, I doubt I'll get to Wakers before Monday, if then, given that there might be other things that catch my interest by then. In the meantime, as I recover from pulling a couple of near all-nighters in a row, check out this Classic Insolence from…
oracknows | January 24, 2010Mike Adams is confused.
I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn't have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there you go. Speaking of writing an NIH R01, that's exactly what I'm doing now, hence the decreased blogorrhea over the last few days, but sometimes trying to cram a five year project into the 13 pages (one page for specific aims and twelve to describe the project) makes my head hurt so much that reading and…
oracknows | January 15, 2010
Although there's been plenty of woo this week (Harriet Denz-Penhey, anyone?), it hasn't been the truly entertaining woo that I so love, you know, the kind of woo of Your Friday Dose of Woo, my long-standing (albeit now intermittent) excursion into the depths of alt-med silliness so over-the-top that it requires--nay, demands!--some serious not-so-Respectful Insolence, but in a more light-hearted way. After all, it's Friday, and what better way to get ready for the weekend than with a little visit to Dr. Orac's Emporium of Quackery and Pseudoscience known as Your Friday Dose of Woo, as long…
oracknows | January 13, 2010People fear chemotherapy.
Some of this fear is not unreasonable, but a lot of it is a vestige of older days, when chemotherapy was much more unpleasant and even at times horrific. However, contrary to the old alt-med trope of chemotherapy as "pure poison" that makes you sicker than cancer, advances in chemotherapy and supportive management that minimizes nausea and other side effects have made chemotherapy easier to bear for many people. Last year, James Randi underwent surgery and chemotherapy for what sounds like colorectal cancer, although he refers to it as "intestinal" cancer. Be that as…
oracknows | January 8, 2010I realize that I haven't done an installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo for a while--well over a month, in fact. Because of the gap between woo installments, I had been thinking that today was the time. There are at least a couple of really good candidates (and a host of halfway decent ones) in my Folder of Woo. However, sadly, another installment in the unfortunately never-ending story of YFDoW will have to wait at least another week. You see, the Bat Signal went up (or should I call it the Woo Signal?), and duty calls. What is the particular instance of someone being wrong on the Internet…
oracknows | January 6, 2010With 2009 now safely in the history books, it's time to look back on the year and "honor" some of the most egregious offenders against science and reason. Fortunately for us, Skeptico has presented his second annual Golden Woo Awards.
I was disappointed to see yet again that surgeon who has led me time and time again to want to put a paper bag over my head or even forge a Doctor Doom mask to hide my face in the shame that he brings upon the honorable profession of surgery. Yes, I'm talking about everybody's favorite creationist neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, who, through the principle of…
oracknows | January 4, 2010Over the holidays, I stayed at home for a combination of some relaxation and some grant writing. (I know, weird.) As I was perusing some of the links I saved during that time, it occurs to me that I totally forgot about one particularly amazing bit of hilarity, courtesy of our old "friend" Deepak Chopra. Given that it was over a week ago, it's probably not worth going into the full Orac mode on it any more, old news and all, but I couldn't let it go completely unremarked upon because it's just so amazingly, hysterically funny. Appearing two days after Christmas, Chopra's post was entitled Woo…
oracknows | December 18, 2009Since I happen to have fallen into the topic of anthropogenic global warming, before I move back to medical topics I might as well have a little fun. Certainly, I could use some, given that I just wrote two posts in which I felt forced to criticize someone whom I admire greatly. Besides, it's been over a week since I last blogged about vaccines on this blog. that has to be some sort of record. Why wreck it now? It feels good to take a break from the topic, and there's always next week. I have no doubt that the anti-vaccine movement will produce something begging for some not-so-Respectful…
oracknows | December 17, 2009Yesterday, I wrote one of my typical Orac-ian length posts that was unusual. What was unusual about it was not its length. Rather, what was unusual about it was the target of its criticism, perhaps one of the last people in the world I would ever have expected to have to have taken issue with, James Randi himself, who had posted a truly embarrassing post in which he cast doubt upon anthropogenic global warming (AGW). What provoked my dismay was not so much that Randi had questioned AGW; what dismayed me so was how he did it. His post, as I pointed out, was chock full of logical fallacies and…
oracknows | December 17, 2009It's that time yet again. The Skeptics' Circle has returned once again to provide a much needed dose of skepticism to the blogosphere. This time around, the 126th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is being hosted over at World of Weird Things.
Next up will be Life, The Universe, and One Brow, where the Skeptics' Circle will finish out 2009. Submission instructions can be found here. Guidelines can be found here.
sa smith | December 17, 2009Youll have to forgive me, folks. Im in the midst of writing a paper (*insert excited Peter Griffin gasp here*-- there are lots of open access virology journals, but I cant promise it).
Writing this paper has reminded me of a luxury we have in scientific research: we can be wrong.
Its bad when a physician or nurse is wrong, giving the wrong diagnosis or a wrong drug.
Its bad when a truck driver is wrong, delivering the wrong thing to the wrong place under the wrong shipping conditions.
Its bad when a teacher is wrong, mixing up a battle date or equation or artist (I hated when my teachers/…