complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | August 22, 2008Regarding the recent antivaccinationist-fueled outbreak of measles reported yesterday, quoth J. B. Handley, founder of Generation Rescue, now arguably the most prominent antivaccine activist group in the U.S., given that its coffers are filled with money from celebrity and pro wrestling fundraisers:
Autism and antivaccines advocates are unapologetic about the return of measles.
"Most parents I know will take measles over autism," said J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a parent-led organization that contends that autism is a treatable condition caused by vaccines.
Except that…
oracknows | August 21, 2008I realize that I've thanked Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield before for giving the U.S. the gift of a measles resurgence. Originally, when I started this sarcastic little exercise, I assumed that it would be 5-10 years before we in the States caught up with the level of endemic measles that has been resurgent in the U.K. in the decade since Andrew Wakefield published his shoddy, fraudulent, pseudoscientific, litigation-driven article in The Lancet claiming that the MMR vaccine was responsible for "autistic enterocolitis," leading to an anti-MMR hysteria that drove down vaccination rates…
oracknows | August 20, 2008
My Academic Woo Aggregator has become even more out of date. You remember my Academic Woo Aggregator, don't you? It's my list of medical schools and major academic medical centers in North America that have adopted what Dr. R.W. once so famously dubbed "quackademic medicine" in that they've created divsions, centers, or departments of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM), in which pseudoscientific or mystical woo is "integrated" with scientific medicine in the mistaken belief that it will somehow improve patient care. Whether it's for chasing money…
oracknows | August 18, 2008I've written about the ridiculousness of the Kinoki Detox Footpads before. While on the way home from work today, I happened to be listening to NPR, and--wonder of wonders!--I came across a skeptical story about the Kinoki Footpads. In the story, the reporter, Sarah Varney, took used footpads to a laboratory to have them tested. Surprise, surprise! There was no significant difference between the used and unused pads in chemical content, nor was there any evidence of elevated heavy metal content of the "used" pads. She then interviewed a doctor who explained just how ridiculous the concept of…
oracknows | August 18, 2008In complaining about the infiltration of pseudoscience in the form of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) into academic medicine, as I have many times, I've made the observation that three common modalities appear to function as "gateway woo, if you will, in that they are the tip of the wedge (not unlike the wedge strategy for "intelligent design" creationism, actually) that slip into any defect or crack it can find and widen it, allowing entrance of more hard core woo like homeopathy behind them.
All of these modalities fall under the rubric of "energy healing" in that the…
oracknows | August 15, 2008I don't know who Kent Sepkowitz is other than that he he's an infectious disease specialist in New York and that he writes for Slate. I also know he's written about penis enlargement, his dislike of magazines' "best doctor" lists (a sentiment with which I can agree, actually), and that he has suggested that Americans should "eat more excrement." What I didn't know is that he was capable of slinging said excrement around (at least, the excrement left over after Americans eat more of it, I suppose), specifically slinging excrement about so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)…
oracknows | August 14, 2008It looks as though at least a couple of my readers have taken to heart my suggestion that, if the pro-CAM, "no skeptics need apply" new wikipedia known as Wiki4CAM won't allow any scientific evidence to be posted within its pages if it does not support the CAM therapy being discussed, then perhaps we should go all Sokal on it and post the most outlandish forms of CAM we can think of in order to see whether any of the editors at Wiki4CAM actually notices, and if anyone does how long it takes.
Thus far, we have two skeptics who have taken up the challenge, one choosing a more subtle--shall we…
oracknows | August 14, 2008It's been quite a while since I wrote about this topic, but, quite frankly, I didn't think anything new was likely to come up that would interest me sufficiently to take it on again. I was almost right; it's been well over two years since the last time I discussed the issue of whether or not vitamin C has any role in treating cancer.
When last I left the topic, two studies had been released that were being widely cited as a "vindication" of Linus Pauling. As you may recall, Pauling was the Nobel Laureate who succumbed to what's sometimes called the "Nobel disease" in that he turned into a…
oracknows | August 12, 2008By this stage of the game, I'm guessing that you're probably as tired of the 2008 Presidential race as I am. Too bad there are still nearly three months of this nonsense to go, and, although John McCain has gone deep into the stupid with ads featuring comparisons of his opponent with Paris Hilton, even Barack Obama doesn't seem entirely immune from attacks of pandering himself, proposing as he has, to eliminate income taxes on seniors. Of course, this being August, and all, the slowest news month of the year, coupled with the--heh--traditional wisdom that no one really pays attention to the…
oracknows | August 11, 2008Seen and photographed on E. 44th St., about a block or two from the United Nations building:
Acupuncture, energy balancing, this guy's got it all--because nothing's too good for our diplomats.
oracknows | August 11, 2008Seen in a bookstore in the Delta terminal at LaGuardia:
It makes perfect sense. What's left after fleecing millions of gullible readers selling books about "alternative" medicine and secret cures "they" don't want you to know about? Fleecing millions of gullible readers by selling books rife financial scams, of course. (I wonder how many pyramid schemes--excuse me, multilevel marketing investment opportunites"--are within this new book.) Of course, Kevin Trudeau definitely knows about financial scams. After all, he did spend time in jail for swindling banks and another for bilking his…
oracknows | August 11, 2008While I was away over the weekend, a reader made me aware of a new development in the world of "alternative"--excuse me, "complementary and alternative"--medicine (a.k.a. CAM). I suppose I should have seen this coming. In retrospect, given the proliferation of wikis of seemingly every shape and for seemingly every purpose, it was inevitable that someone, somewhere would put together a wiki for CAM, known as the Wiki4CAM: Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Encyclopedia.
My first thought was that maybe I should register. Certainly I could edit some articles, although, despite what…
oracknows | August 7, 2008...to ask über-quack Hulda Clark, the woman who disagrees with Dr. Simoncini in that she thinks that all cancer is caused by an intestinal fluke and that she can cure it by "zapping" it with a chintzy device she calls a "Zapper" that looks a lot like a Scientology E-meter, any question you want. She's going to be broadcasting her quackery all over the intertubes tonight on Patrick Timpone's One Radio Network at 7 PM CDT:
Thursday, August 7, 7-8 PM Talk to the Legendary Dr. Hulda Clark
Dr. Clark has a clinic in Mexico and claims a high success rate with Cancer patients and uses the word "…
oracknows | August 7, 2008I don't much like Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com (formerly NewsTarget.com). Indeed, I haven't yet been able to find a more blatant purveyor of the worst kind of quackery and paranoid anti-physician and anti-medicine conspiracy theories anywhere on the Internet, with the possible exception of Whale.to. However, Whale.to is so utterly, outrageously, incoherently full of not just quackery but paranoid New World Order conspiracy theories and other paranormal silliness that any but the most deluded can easily see it for what it is with just a cursory reading of a few of its many, many pages. It's…
oracknows | August 4, 2008I've lamented time and time again how much woo has managed to infiltrate academic medicine, even to the point where prestigious medical schools such as Harvard and Yale have fallen under its sway. I've even gone so far as to lament that resistance is futile when it comes to the rising tide of woo threatening to wash over academic medicine, although lately I've been in a more pugnacious mood.
But what good is a pugnacious mood when denialist pseudoscience starts popping up credulously reported in news sources tailored for physicians and other health care professionals? That's exactly what…
oracknows | July 29, 2008The stupid continues to metastasize.
I wrote yesterday about a truly bad and irresponsible hit piece on Paul Offit and the American Academy of Pediatrics written by the anti-vaccinationist sympathizer Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News. Since I've already rehashed what was so bad about it, I won't go on about it. However, it appears that Alicia Mundy at the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog picked up the story yesterday and ran with it--stupidly, as demonstrated by this passage:
Drugmakers have given millions in grants and other kinds of payments to the AAP and helped build its headquarters, CBS…
oracknows | July 23, 2008Enough with Radovan Karadzic, already!
I know schadenfreude can be a fun thing. I've even indulged in it myself from time to time. I also know that Radovan Karadzic was a very, very bad man who engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Balkans wars of the early and mid-1990s. My interest in the Holocaust and Holocaust denial makes it hard not to see the parallels between Karadzic and what Hitler wanted to do.
So, wonder all the people who have forwarded me links to stories revealing that Karadzic had been practicing alternative medicine while he was on the lam all these years, why have…
oracknows | July 23, 2008I'm envious of Steve Novella. Well, just a little, anyway. The reason is that he's somehow managed to annoy David Kirby and the anti-vaccine contingent enough to provoke what appears to be a coordinated response to his debunking of anti-vaccine propaganda. For that alone he deserves some serious props.
You may have wondered why I haven't written much about Amanda Peet giving an interview in which she pointed out that she had looked into the matter and had found no reason to believe that vaccines caused autism or were unsafe. In the same interview, she referred to parents who don't vaccinate…
oracknows | July 22, 2008I've gone on record as saying more times than I care to remember that there is no such thing as "alternative" medicine. There is only medicine. Indeed, the only reason any medicine is considered "alternative" is (1) it is on a scientific basis incredibly improbable and/or it comes from a pre-scientific "healing" tradition; (2) its efficacy is unproven in scientific studies and clinical trials; (3) its efficacy has been tested in randomized clinical trials and found wanting; or (4) a combination of (1) plus one or more of the other three. Of course, one argument that I have made before is that…
oracknows | July 21, 2008...professional wrestling!
You know, it seems eerily appropriate. Generation Rescue always struck me as being akin to pro wrestling anyway, especially its founder J. B. Handley. His antics in the service of the scientifically discredited notion that mercury in vaccines cause autism (or, these days, that it's vaccines that cause autism) always struck me as being largely for show more than anything else, and certainly his trademark bluster is very much like that of a pro wrestler taunting his opponents.
Generation Rescue apparently gets the celebrities it deserves.
I also have to wonder if this…