Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | October 10, 2007One development that will increasingly pose an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable question for newspapers is the increasing addition of blogs run under the banner of newspapers. I'm not sure if it's cluelessness about the blogosphere leading newspapers to think that they can have bloggers write whatever they want under the newspaper's banner and not have it reflect on their reptuation, but reputable papers have in some cases allowed some seriously credulous people to spread misinformation in a seemingly respectable form.
This thought occurred to me when I was made aware of a blog entry by…
oracknows | October 5, 2007Don't forget, once again the time is fast approaching. Soon yet another installment of the Skeptics' Circle will be upon us. In fact, it's less than a week away and due to land at Infophilia on Thursday, October 11. So, if you're a blogger and regularly (or even not-so-regularly) like to apply the scientific method, skepticism, and critical thinking to dubious claims, send the Infophile a submission to the carnival! Contact and deadline information is here, and guidelines for submission are here.
Once again, if you're a blogger want to host an edition of the Skeptics' Circle yourself, drop me…
oracknows | October 5, 2007Over the last 15 months that this regular Friday feature has been in existence, I've come across some real doozies in the world of woo. Who could forget, for example, quantum gyroscopic theories of homeopathy? Or the DNA activation guy? Or the "no plane" conspiracy theory of 9/11? Or a certain disgusting "feedback loop" for curing cancer? A few others stand out from the pack, like Healing Sounds and Dr. Emoto, as rare examples of just the right amount of superficial plausibility married to over-the-top craziness to be memorable.
This week's installment might just be one of these. It is truly…
oracknows | October 2, 2007Last week, I wrote about an overhyped acupuncture study that purported to show (but didn't, really) that acupuncture is more effective than "conventional" therapy in the treatment of low back pain. This story reverberated through the Internet and blogosphere as "proof" that acupuncture "works" when in reality the study was very weak evidence of any effect due to needles being placed into the skin and only showed that meridians are a meaningless concept (i.e., the finding that sham acupuncture was just as effective "real" acupuncture). If acupuncture does do anything, this study was pretty…
oracknows | September 28, 2007
In looking back at all the various bizarre incarnations of woo that I've covered during the last year or so since I started doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was wondering if there was a form of woo that I had not covered yet. Woo seems to come in several forms, such as energy woo, water woo, pH woo, "detoxification" woo, religious woo, and psychic woo, among others, with certain themes that just keep recurring over and over. I'm sure there's enough material there for a Ph.D. thesis on the classification of woo, if some intrepid graduate student were interested. For this week, I was looking…
oracknows | September 27, 2007Damn that Factitian! Now he's gone too far! In hosting the 70th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, he's revealed some of the deepest darkest secrets of the Skeptical Atheistic Darwinist Scientific Conspiracy to Conquer All (SADSCCA), also known as The Conspiracy Factory in some circles. And you'll never believe who the leader of the conspiracy from whom we all take our marching orders is!
I may have to become more insolent and less respectful. After all, our leader has commanded it:
Yes. Put Orac on it. And someone tell him to stop being so respectful, and more insolent. I prefer the insolence…
oracknows | September 26, 2007I hadn't thought of this possible consequence of global warming before if homeopathy were actually true, but it's frightening to contemplate.
Fortunately, I think that even in this case the level of dilution wouldn't be enough.
oracknows | September 26, 2007Never let it be said that Orac doesn't give the people what they want.
Well, most of the time, anyway.
What I'm referring to is a recent German study about acupuncture for low back pain that's been making its way around the media. I had actually been planning on commenting about it yesterday, but Iranian President (and Holocaust denier) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University intervened and took me on one of my occasional diversions away from science and medicine into the history of the Holocaust, Holocaust denial, and politics. In just that two day interval, I've been deluged…
oracknows | September 24, 2007Pity poor John Ioannidis.
The man does provocative work about the reliability of scientific studies as published in the peer-reviewed literature, and his reward for trying to point out shortcomings in how we as scientists and clinical researchers do studies and evaluate evidence is to be turned into an icon for cranks and advocates of pseudoscience--or even antiscience. I first became aware of Ioannidis two years ago around the time of publication of a paper by him that caused a stir, entitled Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research. In that study,…
oracknows | September 21, 2007
As I usually do on Thursday nights, I was perusing my legendary Folder of Woo looking for just the thing to be interesting and entertaining to both me as the blogger and you as the reader. As happens occasionally, nothing was really doing it for me. Nothing was getting me fired up to launch into yet another installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo. I thought about going back to the well of Life Technology (believe it or not, there is still some woo there to which I have not yet applied my special brand of Respectful Insolenceâ¢), but somehow I just wasn't in the mood. Let's face it, after…
oracknows | September 18, 2007My recent update of my ongoing discussion of the Abraham Cherrix case reminded me that there's a bit of alarming e-mail being sent out and forwarded far and wide. If you read it, at first glance, you will think it sounds utterly horrifying, the Abraham Cherrix and Katie Wernecke cases all rolled up into one and then placed on steroids to the point that even a maven of evidence-based medicine would have to take pause--if the story were true.
The source of the e-mail seems to be the Natural Solutions Foundation/Health Freedom USA, given all the "donate" buttons in the webpage to which I tracked…
oracknows | September 17, 2007
It would appear that there's finally some good news in the strange and sad case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix. The AP reports that he and his doctor are reporting that his lymphoma is in remission again:
FLOYD, Va. -- A 17-year-old who won a court battle against state officials who tried to force him to undergo chemotherapy for his lymphatic cancer is in remission following radiation treatments over the past year, the teen and his doctor said.
Starchild Abraham Cherrix's case spurred debate on whether the government should get involved in family medical decisions. It also led to a state law…
oracknows | September 14, 2007
Earlier this week, I deconstructed a truly inane article on Mike Adams NewsTarget website espousing dangerous cancer quackery, with claims that herbal concoctions alone could "naturally heal" cancer. Such a claim wouldn't have attracted bringing the hammer of Respectful Insolence⢠down if there had been some actual evidence presented that this healer could do what she claimed she could do. Unfortunately, as is the case with virtually all such claims, there was none, just a complicated regimen involving four or five different herbal brews involving a total of around 40 different plants and…
oracknows | September 13, 2007Howdy, thar, pardners! The Skeptics' Circle Saloon is open for business, and, after bein' away for more than two ears, Brent's done gone and set up a hum-dinger of a meeting:
We rode up to the front of the Skeptic's Circle Saloon and dismounted. Where once there were only two hitching posts, seven stood in their place. "Old Doc Orac must be doing something right," I said with a smile.
I had heard that Doc had taken over running the Saloon from St. Nate a while back. I also heard that he had moved out of his office in town and had put up his surgery right in the Saloon. I adjusted the weight…
oracknows | September 12, 2007I'm away from regular blogging for a couple of weeks, and what do I find when I finally get back into the swing of things?
Dangerous cancer quackery published on Mike Adams' Newstarget site, that's what.
I know, I know. I shouldn't be surprised, and I'm not. It's all par for the course for Newstarget, where evidence-based medicine is viewed as nothing but a conspiracy of big pharma, evil scientific doctors, and the FDA to poison patients against their will. Truly, Mike Adams has decided to go head-to-head with Whale.to and Dr. Mercola for the title of most ridiculous website ostensibly about…
oracknows | September 10, 2007Way back when I first started my blog, one of my favorite blogs was A Photon in the Darkness, in which Prometheus regularly demolished quackery, particularly autism-related quackery. Sadly, Prometheus' blogging has become more and more sporadic over the last year or so, with gaps sometimes longer than a month between posts. I was worried that he might be retiring permanently from the blogosphere. That would be a great loss.
Recently, however, Prometheus has been a bit more active. In fact, he's even moved his blog to a new location: http://www.photoninthedarkness.com. Moreover, he's recently…
oracknows | September 9, 2007The Secular Outpost informs me of the existence of a brand new Jack Chick tract. I don't know if it truly is new or not, but it does have its copyright listed as 2007. This time around, Jack is explaining why the dinosaurs really died out. (Hint: It wasn't some big nasty meteor millions of years ago.) It starts out with humans hunting a dinosaur and degenerates from there.
(Click on the picture for the full tract.)
This was so silly that at first I thought it must be a parody. But then I remembered: This is Jack Chick we're talking about here. I will say one thing, though. The picture of…
oracknows | September 7, 2007Hot on the heels of the first Orac-free Skeptics' Circle in two years, amazingly, another Skeptics' Circle is coming around the pike far faster than I would have expected. This time around, it will be hosted by a most able blogger, Brent Rasmussen over at the very prominent skeptical blog, Unscrewing the Unscrutable. Brent's hosted once before, but that was over two years ago. I'm glad to have him back hosting and hope that he doesn't take such a long time before hosting yet again. In any case, Brent's posted instructions for submitting your best skeptical blogging to his edition of the…
oracknows | September 7, 2007
I debated about whether to do Your Friday Dose of Woo this week.
I really wasn't sure if I was up to it. As regular readers know, I was on vacation in London during the last week in August. Unfortunately, I returned to the news of a death in the family on my wife's side, making the last few days a seriously saddening time. I even tried to keep blogging through it as a release to take my mind off of things, but, as the last two days showed, I reached the point where that didn't work anymore. I guess it's a good thing there's still quite a bit of stuff to be mined from the old blog archives…
oracknows | September 4, 2007A couple of weeks ago, before I went on vacation, the BBC aired a two-part documentary by Richard Dawkins entitled The Enemies of Reason. Part One dealt primarily with the paranormal and various New Age phenomena, while Part Two, which aired mere days before my London trip, dealt squarely with alternative medicine in an uncompromising fashion. One key segment of Part Two discussed the bizarre magical thinking that is known as homeopathy. Although I quibbled a bit about certain aspects of how Dawkins presented homeopathy, overall I thought it was the best deconstruction on video of the…