February 7, 2012
You heard me. There is a shocking conspiracy, directly from the nefarious leaders of the one world government at the UN and their pawn, Barack Obama to add more public transportation and green space to your neighborhood.
Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against…
February 6, 2012
Eisen writes
Thus, people joining in the new boycott have no excuses not to follow through. There are plenty of viable OA options and it is simply unacceptable for any scientist who decries Elsevier's actions and believes that the subscription based model is no longer serving science to send a…
February 5, 2012
No one likes occupiers. They're like fish and houseguests, they start to stink after a short period of time. And I worry that as time goes on the movement will only have a more and more destructive impact on progressive politics and political discourse. This isn't to say they can't be effective…
January 23, 2012
Today's NYT has Thomas Edsall's What the Left Get's Right, the follow up piece to last week's What the Right Get's Right, and what's fascinating is how even conservative commentators think liberals get science right more often than conservatives. Or at least they are less likely to view it…
January 18, 2012
A few weeks ago Tara Parker Pope wrote The Fat Trap for the NYT and once I read it I started sending it to other doctors I know. It is a great summary on the current knowledge of why we get fat, and more importantly for those of us that already are tipping the scales, why is it so damn hard to…
January 17, 2012
Zite has failed me. For some reason under the "science" heading it referred me to thisold hpathy article on homeopathic treatment of burns. I realize this site has been a source of idiocy for years but I think this is a true gem. It makes me want to cry for humanity. Orac, don't look, it will…
January 14, 2012
Being inactive for the last couple of years I still read about denialism being mentioned in some interesting places. Two in particular I thought I share.
Peter Gleick in Forbes write on "The Rise and Fall of Climate Change Denial is interesting largely because it's in Forbes. And predictably,…
January 13, 2012
At It's not junk Michael Eisen continues to expose the shameless actions of Carolyn Maloney to sell out science for the sake of publishers like Elsevier. As we remarked last week, it seems that very little money is required to buy a representatives favor towards your industry, even if that means…
January 13, 2012
Via Zite I found the article How Doctors Die by Ken Murray and was surprised to find it one of the best I've read on the issue of end-of-life care. The context is that of how Doctors typically forgo extreme measures in the face of terminal diagnoses, and often reject the type of care we routinely…
January 9, 2012
Via Ed
If you ever wondered what motivated this particular HIV/AIDS denialist this video makes it obvious. Duesberg comes out and blames homosexual promiscuity for AIDS rather than a virus. I think examples like this make it clearer that the ideology responsible for this denialism is plain just…
January 9, 2012
As Chris discussed Saturday the WSJ had a silly article in which a woman demands a prescription drug from a flight attendant, asking for the wrong drug to treat her problem acutely, and then shockingly was refused this service. Worse, Nexium is mentioned by name, multiple times, and Nexium is…
January 7, 2012
And get's it wrong
What's amazing is they rank Newt first at the same time acknowledging he destroyed the Office of Technology Assessment.
Jon Huntsman may have the most rational scientific and technological policies of anyone in the field, but Gingrich, sometimes called Newt Skywalker, has far…
January 7, 2012
I'm never shocked by what Issa can do in a never-ending downward spiral of serving business interests, but it's sad that NY rep Carolyn Maloney has joined him backing a bill to sell out science. Once again the publishers are trying to destroy public access, and make everyone pay to read science…
January 6, 2012
For some reason the NYT is all about neck injury lately. In yesterday's discussion of a possible chiropractic induced injury, Russell asked:
But given all the other stresses people put on their necks, from accidents such as headbumps, from purposeful athletics such as whacking soccer balls, and…
January 6, 2012
When Duesberg was recently given space in Scientific American I think the blogosphere was rightly chagrinned that they would give space to a crank whose crackpot ideas are thought to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. But it seemed at the time he had been keeping his denialism…
January 5, 2012
This week's think like a doctor column in the NYT is great. It asks the question, if a woman goes to a chiropractor, gets her neck manipulated, and within hours and for the succeeding four years she's had symptoms of severe headaches and a pulsatile sound in her ears, what is the diagnosis?
You…
January 5, 2012
Seth Mnookin has reasons to hope. It has been clear though for years that Huffpo was a clearinghouse for what I would describe as liberal crankery, which includes things like Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine crankery, or Bill Maher's anti-pharma paranoia.
But now they have a new site, Huffpo Science…
January 5, 2012
As you can see, mine included blogging again. Fortunately, I'm in a brief research hiatus from surgical residency, so for the next year or so, I actually have some free time. Today I was inspired to start by the Huffington Post of all things, and with good news!
I realized that one of the…
May 24, 2010
Luckily they don't make the mistake of actually debating denialists. The feature of last weeks issue, "Age of Denial" is a series of articles by skeptics and one laughable rebuttal, discussing the nature of denialism and tactics to use against it. They do quite a good job covering the basics,…
March 30, 2010
I have now completed almost a year of surgical internship, and as I'm sure you've noticed from my sparse blogging, I've had little free time for writing. It's a shame too because surgery is just so cool.
Intern year is mostly about learning to manage surgical patients, basically people in varying…
March 29, 2010
With the recent victory of this administration in passing health care reform I felt it was time to talk again about the importance of this issue and some of my own experiences in the last year of my surgical training.
I was, and still am of the belief that reform, whatever form it might take, will…
November 16, 2009
So who here has actually read the health care bill?. I've been devoting a bit of time each week to peruse more and more of it, and while there are endless obstacles to a complete understanding of it (including legalese and the annoying tendency of legislation to contain edits to other bills…
August 24, 2009
You might have noticed I've been busy for the last couple of months. This is because I've started my surgical internship, and when not working, am usually either sleeping or eating. I'm going to endeavor to write more though, because I think important things are going on in the world, and because…
August 22, 2009
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not dead. Instead I've been working hard as a new surgical intern and sadly not finding the time to write for the denialism blog. However, now more than ever, it seems that we need to talk about the problem of denialism.
Two major new issues for denialism have…
June 11, 2009
Orac has already pointed out the disgusting hate behind the Holocaust museum shooter and his holocaust denial. Others around the internet, in particular Pat at Screw Loose Change have pointed out he was an example of crank magnetism. Not surprisingly, he was also a 9/11 truther (which as Pat says…
June 8, 2009
Our recent discussions of HIV/AIDS denial and in particular Seth Kalichman's book "Denying AIDS" has got me thinking more about the psychology of those who are susceptible to pseudoscientific belief. It's an interesting topic, and Kalichman studies it briefly in his book mentioning the "suspicious…
June 5, 2009
Science has an editorial today discussing a topic near and dear to me, what medical schools should require from undergraduates before admission.
Since I was a bit non-traditional as an undergraduate premed (I was a physics major), I am happy to see that they've ignored calls to overload…
June 4, 2009
We're starting to hear about how Obama intends to implement healthcare in this country.
President Barack Obama says he's open to requiring all Americans to buy health insurance, as long as the plan provides a "hardship waiver" to exempt poor people from having to pay.
Obama opposed such an…
June 1, 2009
PZ brings to my attention this article in Newsweek which sums up Oprah's views on health, and one sadly must come to the conclusion that Oprah is a crank. Based on our definition of crankery, one of the critical aspects is the incompetence of an individual in judging sources of information. How…
June 1, 2009
The onion, as always, nails it:
Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!
I...I think it's finally over. Our reactionary emotional response seems to have stopped it dead in its tracks. If I'm right, all we have to do now is smugly reiterate our half-formed thesis and--oh,…
