atavism

There's a good rule of thumb about headlines (other than Betteridge's Law of Headlines) that I use when perusing articles. It's particularly useful for evaluating headlines about medical and science stories. Basically, if a headline says something like, "everything you know about X is/might be/could be wrong" or "everything scientists know about X is/might be/could be wrong," it's a highly reliable indication that much of what is in the article that follows is very likely to be unmitigated, grade-A bullshit. I realize that it might be confirmation bias on my part (I am, after all, a skeptic…

As I happened to be out last night at a function for my department, I didn’t have the time necessary to lay out a 2,000 word bit of Insolence. I did, however, have time to note that yet another practitioner unhappy with being criticized over his scientifically questionable treatment, in this case, Dr. Frank Arguello, has expressed grave, grave unhappiness with science-based criticism over his atavistic chemotherapy, so much so that he’s threatening to sue over it even though he really has no case. In fact, this guy is a bit more—shall we say?—over the top than the average subject of criticism…

Not infrequently, I’m asked why it is that I do what I do. Why do I spend so many hours of my free time, both here and at my not-so-super-secret other blog (NSSSOB), to write my detailed analyses of various forms of quackery, analyses of scientific studies, and expressions of my dismay at the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine, particularly medical academia in a phenomenon I like to call “quackademic medicine”? One reason, of course, is because I passionately believe in what I am doing. Another reason is that I want information countering various forms of dubious medicine to be out…