complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | July 21, 2008In the celebrity vaccine wars, as we all know, Jenny McCarthy has become the de facto leader of the "vaccines-cause-autism" lunatic fringe. However, apparently she has managed to recruit another celebrity to help her out. Her choice is amazingly appropriate: Britney Spears, who was seen at a fundraiser for "Jenny McCarthy's autism charity Generation Rescue."
Because no one knows parenting and science like Britney Spears, I guess.
On the other hand, I have to wonder what J. B. Handley, founder of GR, thinks of having the Hollywood press refer to his baby as "Jenny McCarthy's autism charity"?…
oracknows | July 21, 2008Well, I won't back down
No, I won't back down
You can stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won't back down
Gonna stand my ground
Won't be turned around
And I'll keep this world from draggin' me down
Gonna stand my ground
And I won't back down
From I Won't Back Down by Tom Petty, 1989
On Friday, I wrote a rather long post about the whole issue of "framing" science and the issue of anti-vaccine activism. In essence, I tweaked Matt Nisbett and Chris Mooney to give those of us in the trenches fighting the antiscientific belief that drives antivaccinationism some tools, some "frames," to use to…
oracknows | July 19, 2008I suppose I had better get ready for another e-mail with a wounded, puppy-dog, plaintive complaint of "I'm not really anti-vaccine" in it. You see, that's what has happened in the past a couple of times after I wrote about that pediatrician to the children of the stars (in particular Jenny McCarthy's child) and ubiquitous go-to pediatrician whenever the media wants to hear some "skepticism" about the safety of vaccines, Dr. Jay Gordon. Clearly, it really, really bothers him when someone refers to him as being "anti-vaccine," but what other term fits him so well these days? After all, Dr.…
oracknows | July 18, 2008Three days ago, ScienceBlogs did something it hasn't done before. ScienceBloggers were given screener DVDs of a new movie by one of our own, Randy Olson of Shifting Baselines. The movie was Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy, and the idea was to get as many of us as possible to review the movie and post our reviews on the same day. The reviews were pretty mixed, ranging from panning the movie to really, really liking it, with the majority from my reading tending towards negative.
Of course, as regular readers know, life intervened for me in a truly depressing way, which is why I was not part of…
oracknows | July 17, 2008Oh, no.
I don't know how they got it. I don't know where they got it. But somehow, they got it. Somehow, those advocates of the idea that mercury in vaccines causes autism have gotten a hold of the white paper telling how big pharma fooled everyone about the real mercury content of vaccines!
It's a veritable smoking gun! How could our Big Pharma and CDC paymasters have allowed this to happen? Even worse, our plans for using D2O to stabilize vaccines have been exposed! Someone will pay for this. The super-secret vaccine police are now questioning every operative, threatening to pump them up…
oracknows | July 16, 2008I was contemplating how to get back into the swing of things as far as getting the blogging juices flowing again after the unfortunate events of the last few days, given how much my last post drained me. I suppose I could have dived into the infamous PZ versus the cracker incident, but, quite frankly, the utter ridiculousness and childishness of the whole affair bored and disgusted me too much, although I don't rule out a brief post about it later today or tomorrow (that is, if anyone even still cares). If I do, I guarantee that my take on the whole kerfluffle will make no one happy, but it…
oracknows | July 11, 2008The other day, I sarcastically "thanked" Andrew Wakefield for his role in making sure that measles is again endemic in the U.K. At the same time I wondered whether in 5 to 10 years I'd be similarly "thanking" Jenny McCarthy for her role in doing the same thing here in the United States.
It looks as though I won't have to wait five years:
At least 127 people in 15 states have come down with the measles, the biggest outbreak in the United States in more than 10 years, Reuters reported.
Cases started springing up in May, when more than 70 people in a dozen states became ill. According to federal…
oracknows | July 11, 2008I'd start out by saying that here's another one for my (in)famous Academic Woo Aggregator, except that this institution is already a part of the Woo Aggregator. The only thing I can say is that Steve Novella (who's from Yale and has had to manage an influx of woo at his home institution) might get to feel a bit of schadenfreude over this, because the institution in question is Harvard University.
And boy is this a doozy. In fact, it's a $6,500 dose of continuing medical education doozy! Check out Structural Acupuncture for Physicians:
Date: 10/2/2008 -- 6/7/2009
Course #: 00292317
Areas of…
oracknows | July 10, 2008While I'm taking some time to rag on TV news for its ludicrously credulous reporting of various "alternative" medicine claims, take a gander at this puff piece on a faith healer.
Where's James Randi when you need him? True, the story mentioned that not one of this faith healer's "healings" could be independently verified with objective information and data, but the rest of the tone of the story is quite credulous.
My answer to ABC News (remember: Steve Wilson works for an ABC affiliate) is this video:
The video speaks for itself. Bentley just kicked a guy with stage IV colon cancer in the…
oracknows | July 10, 2008What is it with the local news media in my hometown?
You might (or might not) remember when I noted back in February that there was one Detroit station that did an unbelievably, hilariously dumb and credulous story about "orbs" in photos and whether they are ghosts or spirits manifesting themselves to their friends and family. That story came courtesy of "reporter" Ama Daetz of the local NBC affiliate WDIV-TV (and I do use the term "reporter" loosely). It was so over-the-top, credulously stupid, so hard to distinguish from an Onion parody, that I even "honored" it with a spot on Your Friday…
oracknows | July 9, 2008Courtesy of antivaccinationist Kool Aid drinker Ginger Taylor, I saw this new term for those who argue against the scientifically dubious proposition that vaccines cause autism, specifically Paul Offit:
Vaccinianity - (Vax.e.an.eh.te) n. The worship of Vaccination. The belief that Vaccine is inherently Good and therefore cannot cause damage. If damage does occur, it is not because Vaccine was bad, but because the injured party was a poor receptacle for the inherently Good Vaccine. (ie. hanna poling was hurt when she came into contact with Vaccine, not because the Vaccine was harmful, but…
oracknows | July 9, 2008I've said it before, and I'll say it again. J.B. Handley, that bull-in-a-china-shop general in the mercury militia who detests me intensely, is about as ignorant as they come when it comes to science and clinical trials. Yesterday, he provided yet more evidence of his cluelessness in his latest piece posted to that repository for all things antivaccine, Age of Autism.
Mr. Handley's all in a lather because the Associate Press published a story yesterday about a proposed NIH-sponsored clinical trial of chelation therapy for autism entitled Fringe autism treatment could get federal study.…
oracknows | July 8, 2008Thanks, Andrew Wakefield.
Thanks for bringing the measles back to the U.K. with your shoddy, litigation- and profit-driven pseudoscience:
Fourteen years after the local transmission of measles was halted in the United Kingdom (UK), the disease has once again become endemic, according to the Health Protection Agency (HPA), the public health body of England and Wales. In an update on measles cases in its weekly bulletin last week, the agency stated that, as a result of almost a decade of low mumps-measles-rubella (MMR) vaccination coverage across the UK, 'the number of children susceptible to…
oracknows | July 8, 2008Having lived in Ohio for eight years and married a woman from the Toledo area, I had come to think that Ohioans had more common sense. I guess I was wrong.
On the other hand, I should have realized that I was wrong. After all, Ohio is home to The Ohio State University Center for Integrative Medicine and the Cleveland Clinic Department of Integrative Medicine. So much for hard-nosed Midwestern skepticism, I guess. My only consolation as a University of Michigan graduate is that Ohio seems to be trying to surpass Michigan for promoting woo in academia. Or it would be were it not that a major…
oracknows | July 7, 2008Given all the heartbreaking stuff that's going on with our dog this week, I'm rather grateful to John Lehrer for pointing me to this uplifting article about the dogs abused by the evil and despicable Michael Vick.
It turns out that that bastard didn't end up leaving all his dogs so vicious that euthanasia is the only option or too vicious to be reclaimed. Through love and hard work, most of the dogs have been saved:
Of the 49 pit bulls animal behavior experts evaluated in the fall, only one was deemed too vicious to warrant saving and was euthanized. (Another was euthanized because it was…
oracknows | July 3, 2008I've written time and time again about how antivaccinationists go out of their way to try to reassure us that they really, truly are not "antivaccine" or even that they support vaccination. Of course, such disclaimers are often nothing more than a prelude to a tirade of blatantly antivaccination rhetoric and misinformation about "toxins" in vaccines and the like, and if you try to pin an antivaccinationist down and ask her if there was any evidence that would ever change her mind or persuade her that it's safe to vaccinate, you'll either get a lot of hemming and hawing of the "Green Our…
oracknows | July 3, 2008
One of the main issues that I've written about quite a bit is the issue of what the state should have the power to do when a child has cancer or another life-threatening disease and the parents choose quackery over scientific medicine when the disease is potentially (or even highly) treatable or curable with standard treatment. Most of the time, this has come in the context of patients like Abraham Cherrix, who, with his parents support chose the quackery that is the Hoxsey therapy over chemotherapy, or Katie Wernecke, whose parents chose high dose vitamin C and other woo, over effective…
oracknows | July 2, 2008I've written extensively before about how advocates of non-science-based "medical" treatments, such as naturopathy, homeopathy, and all the woo that follows have been waging a war on all fronts against science- and evidence-based medicine in their effort to have their so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (or the newer, brighter, shinier name "integrative medicine") be perceived as co-equal with scientific medicine. They've infiltrated academia. They've insinuated their agenda into medical school curricula. They've even managed to have the teaching of woo become a mandatory part…
oracknows | July 1, 2008Yesterday, I was depressed. Today I'm a little irritated.
I'm irritated because I came across a study from a couple of weeks ago that's actually a really cool study that applies actual science to the question of how diet and lifestyle changes might alter biology to improve health. It's exactly the sort of study that can apply help understand how diet affects health. It's a study by Dean Ornish, who's widely known for his advocacy of a lifestyle-driven approach to treating atherosclerotic coronary artery disease and producing evidence in the early 1990s that such a lifestyle alteration could…
oracknows | June 30, 2008
"I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward, you will service us." - Locutus of Borg.
"Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile...Your culture will adapt to service ours." -- The Borg.
I'm a bit depressed these days.
Maybe a better term for it would be pessimistic, as I'm not really depressed about the state of my life per se. More precisely, I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic about the state of science- and evidence-based medicine in this country. What brought this pessimism to the forefront was last Thursday's post, which…