Medicine
oracknows | December 6, 2011One thing I've learned over the years is that there is a palpable hostility in the "alternative" medicine world towards chemotherapy. Many are the times I've posted examples, including rants by Mike Adams, cartoons, and a post about what I like to call the "2% gambit" that claims that chemotherapy only contributes 2% to survival in cancer. Basically, that last gambit uses and abuses a rather mediocre study whose design almost seemed intended to minimize any detected benefit from chemotherapy. On second thought, strike the word "seem." It was pretty much designed to minimize any apparent…
pharyngula | December 4, 2011The future is arriving fast. Here are the instructions for assembling a $500 home molecular biology laboratory — you can do it! And it's getting cheaper all the time!
The widespread and increasing availability of second-hand professional laboratory equipment or inexpensive new commercial surrogates means that it is now unchallenging to set up a fully functional molecular laboratory for less than $500 in equipment costs. Coupled with the presence of sources for all reagents and supplies needed in formats that are safe for general use, the work presented here demonstrates that capacity to set…
oracknows | December 2, 2011I'm a cancer surgeon and have been since I finished my fellowship nearly 13 years ago. That is, of course, one big reason that, after I found myself drifting towards becoming a skeptic, it didn't take long for me to take an interest in "alternative medicine," in particular alternative medicine for cancer. Perhaps that's why I went a little bit crazy on Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski earlier this week for his "antineoplaston" therapy and his clinic's harassment of critical bloggers. As a result of that incident, I decided to keep my eye out even more than usual for clinics, websites, or practitioners…
oracknows | November 30, 2011As I said yesterday, it's time to take a break from blogging about Stanislaw Burzynski; that is, unless something new happens that I consider to be worth commenting on. Fear not, though. I will return to the subject. As I said yesterday, Burzynski is now pushing some sort of nonstandard "personalized gene-targeted therapy" in addition to his antineoplaston therapy.
In the meantime, it's back to business. I'm a bit tired, but I'm (almost) never too tired to analyze a claim made by a supporter of pseudoscience.
Amazingly, sometimes the gods of the blogosphere are kind and benevolent. They…
oracknows | November 29, 2011Remember yesterday how I said I would be following the "rule of three" in blogging about the Burzynski Clinic, its questionable practices in charging patients huge sums of money for dubious therapies, the even more dubious science behind his "antineoplaston therapy," and his shill Marc Stephens threatening bloggers with legal action in hilariously crude ways? In other words, in the tradition of comics and documentaries everywhere, I'd stop at three posts about Burzynski, at least for the moment.
I lied.
Well, no, actually I didn't lie. When I wrote yesterday's post, I fully planned on taking…
pharyngula | November 25, 2011Do these claims make you at all suspicious? A few people on Twitter told me I should look into this panacea.
Cures heart disease!
Eases anxiety and depression!
Removes unsightly moles!
Arthritis! Snoring! Diarrhea! Acne! Diabetes! Removes warts! Mighraines! Lose weight! Alcoholism! Glaucoma!
IT CURES CANCER! All forms of cancer!
And all without any detrimental effects whatsoever!
Add to the extravagant medical claims, the additional accusation that you can't get this treatment because of a conspiracy by BigPharma and greedy, grasping doctors who want people to suffer so they…
oracknows | November 25, 2011A common thread that runs through the activities of various antiscience cranks, quacks, charlatans, and denialists is an extreme aversion to criticism. In fact, in many cases their aversion to criticism is so extreme that a common reaction of cranks to even legitimate criticism is to try to shut that criticism down any way possible. Sometimes, this intimidation takes the form of harassment or attempts to get a critic fired from his job, as has happened with René Najera and yours truly. this takes the form of lawsuits or abuse of the legal process, as has been experienced by Dr. Paul Offit,…
oracknows | November 21, 2011One of the greatest gifts anyone can give is to donate his body to science after death. Such anatomic gifts contribute to the training of medical students, residents, and other medical professionals as well as being used for research that can contribute to the advancement of medical science. One of the things that makes an anatomic gift such a profound gift is that the donor usually has little control over what their body or body parts will be used for. There is, thus, more than a little trust in medical science involved in these gifts. When the deceased is a child, the donation of a child's…
oracknows | November 18, 2011I've heard it said (actually, I've said it myself) that if you don't have the science and evidence to back up your point of view, in order to persuade someone, make a movie. At least, this seems to be the philosophy of a number of cranks who have produced movies promoting pseudoscience over the last five years or so. The first one of these movies that really caught my attention was an anti-evolution, pro-"intelligent design" creationism documentary narrated by Ben Stein and released in 2008, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie was pure creationist propaganda, complete with Ben Stein…
tsmith | November 15, 2011Oh, Discover. You're such a tease. You have Ed and Carl and Razib and Phil and Sean, an (all-male, ahem) cluster of science bloggy goodness. But then you also fawn over HIV deniers Lynn Margulis and Peter Duesberg. Why can't you just stick with the science and keep the denial out?*
But no, now they've let it spill into their esteemed blogs. I was interested to see a new blog pop up there, The Crux, a group blog "on big ideas in science and how these ideas are playing out in the world. The blog is written by an outstanding group of writer/bloggers and scientist/writers who will bring you the…
sa smith | November 9, 2011Im sure you all have heard this story--
Chickenpox parties--just a Facebook friend away
"Pox packages," child abuse, and the violation of federal law
I dont have much to add other than a question for the parents doing this:
I mean, lets ignore the ethical and legal implications of what they are doing. Lets just focus on the 'logic' behind what they are doing.
They do not want to vaccinate their children, because they are worried about their children becoming 'contaminated' from 'chemicals' or 'toxins' or 'voodoo spirits' or whatever and get sick.
Vaccines were developed by hundreds of…
oracknows | November 8, 2011I've written about the concept of "misinformed" consent with respect to the anti-vaccine movement. To summarize, "misinformed consent" is a perversion of the concept of informed consent in which cranks claim to be championing true informed consent (and, by implication, that opponents have not) when in fact they are presenting a scientifically unsupportable assessment of the risks and benefits of an intervention. In the case of vaccines, anti-vaccine activists play up the risks of vaccines far beyond what science supports, attributing to them, for instance, risks of autism, autoimmune disease…
oracknows | November 5, 2011Fridays are usually a bad time for blogging for me, but it's a choice, not due to any circumstances. Usually, on Friday nights, I consciously make an effort to stay away from the computer and the blog. Frequently, I'm tired, and not infrequently I'll crash on the couch, only to wake up after midnight and wander upstairs to bed. Consequently, when something happens on Friday afternoon or evening, I often don't find out about it until Saturday morning, which means I probably won't blog about it before Monday because I've intentionally been trying not to post anything on the weekends. As hard as…
lborkowski | November 4, 2011SciDev.Net's TV Padma reports that tuberculosis experts are looking to India to develop affordable TB-testing kits. An estimated four million cases of the disease go undetected, and two million TB patients die every year. India has increased its efforts at finding and treating cases of the disease, but diagnostics still present a challenge, Padma explains:
TB tests come in a range. Latent infections can show up as a reaction when the protein, tuberculin, is injected under the skin. Blood tests may reveal immune molecules (gamma interferon) produced by the body to protect against the bacterium…
oracknows | November 4, 2011About a month ago, I discussed a rather disturbing development, namely the initiative by Dr. Andrew Weil to set up something he was going to call the American Board of Integrative Medicine, all for the purpose of creating a system of board certification for physicians practicing "integrative medicine" (IM), or, as I prefer to call them, physicians who like to integrate pseudoscience with their science, quackery with their medicine. At the time, I referred to it as a board certification in woo. Was I harsh? Yes. Accurate? Also yes. Unfortunately, many medical centers, both academic and…
oracknows | October 31, 2011I've been blogging about alternative medicine for nearly seven years and writing about it, either on Usenet or in other forums for several years before. As a result, there are times when I start to think that maybe I've seen it all. And almost every time I start thinking that, I come across something that leaves me scratching my head and either joking about learning something new every day or just scratching my head. This case will be the latter.
Regular readers all know Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger. Adams created NewsTarget.com which later evolved into NaturalNews.com, one of the…
oracknows | October 31, 2011I've written quite a bit about Steve Jobs' battle with pancreatic cancer over the years and, more recently, in the wake of his death nearly four weeks ago. The reason, of course, is that the course of his cancer was of intense interest after it became public knowledge that he had cancer. In particular, what I most considered to be worth discussing was whether the nine month delay between Jobs' diagnosis and his undergoing surgery for his pancreatic insulinoma might have been what did him in. I've made my position very clear on the issue, namely that, although Jobs certainly did himself no…
oracknows | October 27, 2011Oh, geez. Mike Adams is at it again.
I know, I know, saying that Mike Adams has just laid down yet another hunk of napalm-grade--nay, hydrogen-bomb grade--burning stupid is akin to saying that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that water is wet, that we need oxygen to survive, or that the moon goes around the earth. It's part of nature and a well-established fact. Even so, sometimes Adams surpasses even himself. Sometimes, when doing so, he even gives me an opportunity to discuss a scientific study and thus look as though I'm actually blogging about peer-reviewed research…
oracknows | October 26, 2011As hard as it is to believe, I've been a physician for 23 years now and a fully trained surgeon for over 15 years. If there's one thing I've learned in that time, it's most doctors really, really don't like to be told what to do. I don't know if part of it comes from all the long years of medical school and residency, with fellowship tacked on for many, during which we're relentlessly told what to do by more senior residents, fellows, and attendings or if it has something to do with the personality traits that lead young people to go into medicine, particularly surgery. It's probably a little…
oracknows | October 21, 2011A couple of weeks ago, in the immediate aftermath of Steve Jobs' death, I took issue with the claims of a skeptic that "alternative medicine killed Steve Jobs." At the time, I pointed out that, although it was very clear that Steve Jobs did himself no favors by delaying his initial surgery for nine months after his initial diagnosis, we do not have sufficient information to know what his clinical situation was and therefore how much, if at all, he decreased his odds of survival by not undergoing surgery expeditiously. To recap: Did Steve Jobs harm himself by trying diet and alternative…