Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | January 15, 2009P.Z. Myers turned me on to a phenomenal proposal at Change.gov, the website of President-Elect Barack Obama's transition team:
Defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine:
Here's a way to increase the available funding to NIH without increasing the NIH budget: halt funding to NCCAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This Center was created not by scientists, who never thought it was a good idea, but by Congress, and specifically by just two Congressmen in the 1990's who believed in particular "alternative" (but scientifically dubious)…
oracknows | December 31, 2008Yesterday, I commented on the tragic death of HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore, who was HIV-positive herself and refused to use antiretroviral drugs during her pregnancy to prevent maternal-fetal transmission of the virus and insisted on breast feeding even though the virus can be transmitted to the baby through breast milk. Her cultish clinging to the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS against all scientific evidence showing otherwise cost her daughter her life in 2005 and, very likely, cost her her own life a few days ago. I concede that it is quite possible that Maggiore did not die…
oracknows | December 31, 2008Now here's something that'll go to Orac's head (if, in fact, he actually had a head instead of a Plexiglass cube of blinking colored lights). He's been named by Rebecca Watson (a.k.a. The Skepchick) as one of the Top 10 Skeptics Who Kicked Ass in 2008!
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I'm tellin' ya, to be included in a list with luminaries such as Ben Goldacre, Amanda Peet, Susan Jacoby (whose book, The Age of American Unreason, I really really need to get around to reading), Phil Plait, and fellow ScienceBlogger P.Z. Myers. Of course, my…
oracknows | December 30, 2008Longtime readers of this blog may remember the case of Eliza Jane Scovill. For newbies and those who might not remember, I've copiously linked to posts written by me and others.
To boil it all down, three years ago a child named Eliza Jane Scovill (often called EJ) died tragically three years ago of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and HIV-associated encephalopathy. The reason is that her mother, Christine Maggiore, was a prominent HIV/AIDS denialist, who, after having been found to be HIV positive back in the early 1990s fell under the sway of Peter Duesberg and came to believe that HIV does…
oracknows | December 30, 2008Here's one for our favorite creationist neurosurgeon: A whole Grand Rounds all about the interface of and application to medicine of the theory of evolution.
oracknows | December 29, 2008Last week, I gave everybody's favorite creationist neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, the gift everyone loves to read but not to receive: the gift of not-so-Respectful Insolence. Christmas or no Christmas, he did ask for it, and far be it from me, given my benevolent nature, not to respond to his plaintiff plea with a resounding "Affirmative!" Nor was I alone. Others joined in. But apparently not everyone thought Dr. Egnor deserving of such a group slapdown. Apparently there is at least one blogger out there who thought that Dr. Egnor needed a defender. Apparently there is at least one blogger…
oracknows | December 26, 2008...more not-so-Respectful Insolence, courtesy not of Orac this time but of other skeptical physician-bloggers!
Enjoy:
Smackdown, please (yes, Egnor, I'm talking to you) (by blog bud PalMD)
Defending science-based medicine (by skeptical neurologist Dr. Steve Novella, who's been known to spar a bit with Dr. Egnor himself over evolution and neuroscience)
Egnorance is Bliss (by Dr. Kimball Atwood IV)
oracknows | December 24, 2008It's Christmas Eve.
I know, I know, it's all supposed to be Peace On Earth, Good Will Towards Men (and Women), and all that jazz. Really, that's exactly what I had intended for today and tomorrow. Indeed, my plan was to do nothing more than a quickie post today and a maybe a couple of brief (and hopefully amusing) Christmas-related posts this afternoon and tomorrow. Really, I had.
Then it came, and it came from a direction that I least expected. Yes, yet another "old friend" of the blog had to go and and not just ask but beg for a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence. My readers…
oracknows | December 23, 2008I'm happy to say, I've never watched an episode of The Doctors, at least if the episode segment I've just been sent is any indication of the quality of the science and medicine discussed on the TV show. The episode, which aired on December 11, featured a segment on autism featuring an old "friend" of the blog. The fact that he was featured on a television show ostensibly designed to discuss medicine and make it accessible to a general audience tells me that not only the producers but the physicians who do the show are utterly without a clue. No, it wasn't J.B. Handley or Jenny McCarthy, but…
oracknows | December 19, 2008I'm a connoisseur of woo.
It's true. Back when I first started blogging, I came across outrageous bits of pseudoscience such as the ones I feature periodically on Your Friday Dose of Woo, and I wasn't sure quite what to do with them. Indeed, I had a hard time deciding if some of them were massive Sokal-type hoaxes or evenif the person writing them really believed in them. Of course, I had a lot of fun taking them on. How could I not? After all, what else can one make of something like, for example, DNA Activation or "healing sounds," or even for that matter that unholy alliance of…
oracknows | December 15, 2008Three goodies on skepticism and science:
Skeptical Battlegrounds: Part III - Alternative Medicine. Suffice it to say, Steve agrees with me. He just lays it all out in one post instead of ten.
Once again, Egnor and Tautologies. Blogchild Mark Chu-Carroll takes on our favorite creationist neurosurgeon, Dr. Egnor. This time he deals directly with something I've touched upon recently: Egnor's false labeling of the theory of evolution as a tautology.
Alternative Medicine's Rapid Spread? Nonsense. Oddly enough, Avery Camarow, whose articles I've taken issue with before for credulity towards the…
oracknows | December 15, 2008Several months ago, I wrote a post about the experimentation with acupuncture by an Air Force physician, Col. Robert Niemtzow. In the post, I started with an admittedly exaggerated vignette--a story, if you will--of a soldier whose leg was shredded by a mortar in battle. When the medic came to treat his wounds and get him ready for transport, this soldier was in for a surprise, because after applying a tourniquet to his leg, this medic offered him not morphine for his pain but acupuncture. At the time, the military acupuncture program spearheaded by Col. Niemtzow was not proposing anything…
oracknows | December 10, 2008
I have to wonder if the most famous denizen of the Discovery Institute in medical circles, Dr. Michael Egnor, is on vacation or something. For some reason, he's been especially active over at the Discovery Institute's repository of pseudoscience, Evolution News & Views, over the last couple of weeks. Neurosurgeons tend to be very busy people, more so even than a humble breast cancer surgeon like me, and few are as motivated as I am to blog. Yet, these days Dr. Egnor's been flooding EN&V with more of his blather than I've seen him do in a long time, maybe ever.
It's times like these…
oracknows | December 5, 2008What is it about celebrity models and credulity towards woo?
Very early in the history of this blog, we first encountered Suzanne Somers, someone who underwent lumpectomy and radiation therapy for breast cancer, as well as radiation, but eschewed chemotherapy for "alternative" medicine. Guess to what she attributed her survival? Then she got into bioidentical hormones, even though it's generally a bad idea to pump yourself full of huge doses of estrogen far beyond anything ever used for hormone replacement therapy if you're a breast cancer survivor. (Her luck in not having induced a…
oracknows | December 4, 2008It may well be; Roger Ebert has finally gotten around to reviewing Expelled! Short version: He didn't like it.
Long version: He really, really didn't like it.
I knew there was a reason I liked Roger Ebert.
oracknows | December 2, 2008Well, it looks as though I've stepped into it yet one more time.
Believe it or not, I hadn't intended to stir up trouble among the ScienceBlogs collective, both English- and German-speaking. Really. Oh, I'll admit that there are occasionally times when I actually do mean to stir up trouble. One recent example is when it was rumored that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might be chosen to be Secretary of the Interior or, even worse, Director of the EPA. Much to my surprise, I actually did manage to stir up a goodly amount of blogospheric reaction, too. Although I believed it to be a good cause, this…
oracknows | November 26, 2008Here we go again.
Every so often, one of the--shall we say?--less popular members of our crew of science bloggers, someone who, despite being an academic whose area of expertise is ostensibly science communication, has stepped in it again. I'm referring, of course to Matt Nisbet. Only this time, it's not him lecturing us just on how to combat creationism. No, this time around, he isn't limiting himself to just that, although that is what he made his name doing, around the blogosphere anyway. This time around, he's perturbed at a certain word, a certain term that we skeptics sometimes feel…
oracknows | November 25, 2008As I sat down on the couch in front of the TV last night to do my nightly blogging ritual, trying to tickle the gray matter to come up with the pearls of wisdom or insolence that my readers have come to know and love, I had a fantastic idea for a serious consideration of a question that comes up in the discussion of science and pseudoscience and how to combat pseudoscience. It would be serious and sober. It would be highly relevant to the interests of my readers. It would rival anything I've ever written for this blog before.
I ended up writing this instead. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow. Besides…
oracknows | November 22, 2008Well, this is depressing to learn. I'd be even more depressed if I were Canadian. All I can say to my neighbors to the north is that I feel your pain, albeit belatedly. I just learned that the recently appointed Minister of State for Science and Technology within Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Cabinet is Gary Goodyear. So what's the big deal?
Gary Goodyear is an chiropractor. Not only that, but he's an acupuncturist, too. Nothing like putting someone who believes in pseudoscience in charge of science and technology. I wonder how that will work out.
Now, for Harper's next appointment, let's…
oracknows | November 21, 2008
I had thought about taking the day off after celebrating the 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle yesterday, but a skeptic's work is never done, and, besides, my wife's out of town for a couple of days. Given the choice of television, working on my program's section of our cancer center core grant or one of the two other grants I'm currently juggling, or blogging, I wonder what appeals to me more. Hmmmm....
Ah, screw it. I've been living my work nearly every waking hour for the last few days. Heck, I even got stuck at work fairly late last night because of the bane of being s surgeon,…