complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | December 10, 2007Dr. Rashid Buttar is a quack. There, I've said it. It's my opinion, and there's lots of evidence to support that opinion. As you know, I seldom actually invoke the "q-word." Indeed, for the longest time after I started blogging I tended to go out of my way to avoid using it, even to the point of being a bit ridiculous, but in Dr. Buttar's case I now have little choice but to make my opinion of him plain.
I've noticed before that, as far as antivaccination cranks and the mercury militia go, when it rains it pours, and stories about such lunacy seem to come in waves. Weeks can go by without my…
oracknows | December 8, 2007See what happens when I actually manage to keep myself from checking my blog for nearly 24 whole hours?
The trolls take over.
Well, they're not exactly trolls. Trolls often don't believe in what they post; they merely post it to get a reaction, for example, like rabid Hillary Clinton opponents posting on pro-Clinton discussion forums. However, true believers invading the discussions on blogs that oppose their viewpoint can produce much the same result as trolls who troll just for the sake of getting a reaction. Think creationists or fundamentalist Christians posting on Pharyngula or HIV/AIDS…
oracknows | December 8, 2007Sorry, but I can't help but feel a bit of schadenfreude over this. Chelationist extraordinaire Dr. Rashid Buttar is, it would appear, in a bit of trouble:
A Huntersville doctor is facing charges of unprofessional conduct.
Dr. Rashid Buttar's alternative medicine clinic treats autism patients from the around the country, but tonight there are questions about his treatment of cancer patients.
The North Carolina Medical Board's allegations are spelled out in a 10 page document.
They could ultimately lead to the revocation of Dr. Buttar's medical license.
He is accused of offering therapies that…
oracknows | December 7, 2007A few weeks ago, Martin over at Aardvarchaelogy, Steve Novella, and I speculated about how alternative medicine modalities might evolve and what the selection pressures on them might be. We all agreed that, to some degree, there is definite selection pressure for remedies that do no harm but that also do no objective good either. In other words, there is selection pressure for placebos.
Obviously, the evolution analogy is imperfect, but there is also another possible explanation for the persistence of something like homeopathy, which is, in essence, no more than water and thus nothing more…
oracknows | December 7, 2007After last week's Your Friday Dose of Woo, which featured an amazingly extravagant bit of woo that took up 10,000 webpages of some of most densely-packed woo language that I've ever seen, I feel the need for a change of pace. It's time to simplify this week. After all, if I were to do nothing but woo on the order of sympathetic vibratory physics, the Wand of Horus, quantum homeopathy, or DNA activation every week, your brain might well fry. And, if your brain didn't fry, my brain would for subjecting myself to such material week after week. Every so often, I need just a little wafer to…
oracknows | December 6, 2007...because, via Skeptico and DC's Improbably Science, I've learned something that could only warm the coldest cockles of my evil scientific and skeptical heart. It's something that tells us that, maybe, just maybe, what we bloggers do in favor of evidence-based medicine may actually be having an effect. British homeopath Manish Bhatia, Director of hpathy.com, has sent out a frantic e-mail bemoaning how those poor, poor homeopaths are having trouble making a living, going so far as to say that homeopathy is "bleeding to death" (great analogy, given that homeopathy is a lot like the medieval…
oracknows | December 6, 2007It's hard to believe that two weeks have flown by once again. It's even harder to believe that the Skeptics' Circle has been around long enough to reach its 75th edition, which this time around comes straight out of Denmark, courtesy of longtime Respectful Insolence commenter and now blogger Kristjan Wager at Pro-Science. Kristjan's a just-the-facts kind of guy and he delivers a just-the-facts kind of Circle, chock full of skeptical bloggy goodness.
Next up to host on December 20, just in time for Christmas (and what better Christmas gift than the gift of skepticism?) is fellow ScienceBlogger…
oracknows | December 5, 2007Lest I forget to mention this one, Randy Cohen, a.k.a. The Ethicist, answers a question. Here's the question:
I work at a hospital where several nurses practice therapies like healing touch and therapeutic touch, said to adjust a patient's energy field and thereby decrease pain and improve healing, although there is no significant evidence for this. If those nurses believe in these treatments, may they tell the patient they are effective? If the treatments provide merely a placebo effect, telling patients about this lack of evidence might undermine that benefit. Would that justify withholding…
oracknows | November 30, 2007
I don't know what it is about woo-meisters and vibration.
I know I've said this before, but it seems to come up so often that I can't help but repeat it. Everything is vibration. Everything. And if it' not vibration, it's waves, be they energy waves, sound waves, or, as I like to describe them waves of pure woo. Add quantum mechanics to the mix, and you have the ingredients a veritable orgy of woo. (And if you want a real orgy, they might even have your back covered there, too.) I had thought that this fascination with vibration among purveyors of woo was a relatively recent phenomenon.
I…
oracknows | November 28, 2007You've probably heard the oft-repeated charge of "alternative" medicine advocates. If you get into a debate or conversation with one, you can almost count on seeing or hearing it before too long. Indeed, we heard a variant of this very claim yesterday coming from über-woomeister supreme Deepak Chopra. I'm referring, of course, to the rant against "conventional" medicine that medication errors claim 100,000 lives a year. Of course, as Mark pointed out, "conventional" therapies actually work, and because they work there's risk to them. Moreover, its hospitals actually care for seriously ill…
oracknows | November 27, 2007
I was originally planning to do a real science post today. Indeed, there are at least two or three interesting studies that have been released in the last month or two that I've been meaning to write up, you know, to lose the snark and make this a real Science Blog. True, having a little fun deconstructing the silliness of homeopaths or antivaccinationists is educational (not to mention entertaining and so fun). However, very so often I feel the need to get serious, and over the last couple of weeks I think I let the snark run a bit more wild than usual, not counterbalanced as much with…
oracknows | November 26, 2007While contemplating the burning stupidity that is Jenny McCarthy over the weekend as she mindlessly parroted some of the worst misinformation of the antivaccine movement and assured an interviewer that she would , all the while solemnly proclaiming that, were she to have another child she ""wouldn't vaccinate at all, never, ever," all the while objecting to her being portrayed as "antivaccine," I couldn't help but notice perhaps an uptick in the use of a favorite antivax question in reference to vaccines:
"Why are we injecting TOXINS into our babies?"
Jenny McCarthy repeated that question (or…
oracknows | November 25, 2007As usual, The Onion gets it right, particularly the part about all acupuncture being "fake" acupuncture.
By the way, this is the study the article is referring to. Meanwhile, Mark Crislip weighs in on this study and some other recent acupuncture studies.
Hmmm. Why should Dr. Crislip have all the fun. True, counting the study above, I have covered three of the studies1, 2, 3 he discussed in his podcast, but maybe I should take a look at the others...
oracknows | November 24, 2007I've never been able to understand advocates of homeopathy. I just have difficulty understanding how otherwise intelligent people can fall for the bad science, the logical fallacies, and the magical thinking necessary to believe that homeopathy is anything other than glorified water, an elaborate, ritualized placebo. I can understand how such an idea may have taken hold 200 years ago, when Samuel Hahnemann first dreamed up the concept that "like cures like" and that diluting these "like" remedies to an extent that, even a few years after the principles of homeopathy were formalized it was…
oracknows | November 23, 2007I know, I know.
Picking on Jenny McCarthy over her now frequent idiotic statements about autism and her parroting of the myth that vaccines cause autism is like shooting fish in a barrel, boxing a one-armed opponent, playing tennis with a blind man (like the infamous Saturday Night Live sketch from so long ago, in which Stevie Wonder was shown playing tennis), or [insert your favorite metaphor or simile here]. I guess that America really is the land of opportunity, though. After all, where else could such a bubble-head go from being Playboy Playmate of the Year, to a raunchy MTV star who made…
oracknows | November 23, 2007Ah, the day after Thanksgiving. I had wondered whether I would have the wherewithal to actually come up with yet another installment of this blog's usual Friday feature. After all, too much food can lead to a decrement in brain function that would make it difficult, if not impossible, to come up with the goods. It seemed to me to be a perfect opportunity to do a treatment of the top-notch woo that you've all come to expect. Fortunately, there's a bit of woo hanging around that I've wanted to have some fun with. This woo is top-shelf, as you will see. The only problem is that I'm not 100%…
oracknows | November 21, 2007I once blogged about an article attempting to address the very question in the title of this post, and I've also discussed in depth how messy the process of evidence-based medicine can be and why that provides an opening for purveyors of "alternative medicine" (my preferred term to describe it being "non-evidence-based medicine") to respond to complaints about the lack of evidence supporting their favored woo with a hearty but fallacious tu quoque.
One of the favorite claims of purveyors of non-evidence-based "alternative" medicine is that modern scientific medicine is actually not very…
oracknows | November 21, 2007He's baaack.
Yes, that radio voice of the mercury militia, the shock jock Don Imus, who was so ignominiously booted from his nationwide syndicated radio show last spring is coming back to the airwaves on December 3 on WABC radio in New York, with plans to syndicate him again nationwide. Personally, although I consider Imus a clueless twit, I'm not sure that he should have been fired over that remark after he apologized, but CBS had every right to can him over it if it so desired. In any case, as some may know, I live within AM radio range of New York; the reasons Imus' impending reappearance…
oracknows | November 20, 2007In the past, I've characterized chiropractors, at least the ones who claim to be able to treat anything other than back pain, as "physical therapists with delusions of grandeur who don't know their limitations." It appears that Panda Bear, MD agrees with me, and he's particularly disturbed about such chiropractors increasingly targeting the pediatric population:
Apparently chiropracty can resolve asthma, ear infections, colic, allergies, and headaches to name just a few. What then, exactly, are pediatric chiropractors doing if it's not treating conditions or diseases...or is your poor Uncle…
oracknows | November 19, 2007There's a rather interesting bit of vaccine politics going on in Prince George's County, Maryland being reported by the AP and The Baltimore Sun:
Scores of grumbling parents facing a threat of jail lined up at a courthouse today to either prove that their school-age kids already had their required vaccinations or see that the youngsters submitted to the needle.
The get-tough policy in Prince George's County was one of the strongest efforts made by any U.S. school system to ensure its youngsters receive their required immunizations.
Two months into the school year, school officials realized…