complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | November 18, 2007So busy was I last week blogging about other things, somehow I missed an amazingly, jaw-droppingly idiotic defense of homeopathy Jeanette Winterson published in The Guardian earlier this week. As you might imagine, it was just begging for a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolenceâ¢. I mean, it was the dumbest article I've seen in a very long time. Unfortunately, other topics kept me from finding my way to it in a timely fashion. Fortunately, two excellent skeptical bloggers have torn the article to shreds, so much so that there is nothing left but a smear on the sidewalk where once…
oracknows | November 18, 2007Note: The Aggregator was updated on May 18, 2008.
Last week, almost on a whim, I decided to try to figure out just how much woo has infiltrated academic medicine by trying to come up with an estimate of just how many academic medical centers offer woo of some form or another in the form of centers of "integrative medicine" or "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM). I was shocked that the list numbered at least 39, with at least 12 offering reiki and five or six offering homeopathy. Dr. RW has expressed his support for this effort and at the same time given me an idea:
I knew such a…
oracknows | November 17, 2007Ever since I started blogging about a story about a youth named Chad Jessop who, it was claimed, developed melanoma and cured himself of it with "natural" remedies, with the result that his mother was supposedly brought before the Orange County Superior Court and his mother thrown in maximum security prison and denied the right to hire her own attorney, I've been fascinated at the contortions of the person most recently responsible for spreading this story, a blogger who goes under the pseudonym of the Angry Scientist. For one thing, the first person to spread this story by e-mail, Thomas…
oracknows | November 16, 2007It may take a long time, but sometimes justice does eventually move to act against a wrong:
A Butler County doctor will stand trial on charges he caused the death of a 5-year-old autistic boy by negligently ordering a controversial treatment, a district judge ordered Thursday.
Dr. Roy Kerry of Portersville ordered chelation therapy - which the federal Food and Drug Administration approves for treating acute heavy-metal poisoning, but not for autism - on Abubakar Tariq Nadama in 2005. During a third treatment, on Aug. 23, the boy went into cardiac arrest and died.
Kerry, 69, is charged with…
oracknows | November 16, 2007Pity poor Nikola Tesla.
Again.
It looks as though the woomeisters have found a way to abuse him yet again. I don't know what it is about Tesla, but he seems to be a magnet for such woo. Well, actually, I sort of do. Tesla was definitely a character and was known for a variety of strange beliefs during his lifetime. I'm pretty sure, though, that he never came up with anything like the Tesla Purple Energy Shield, which was lovingly described in this very forum about seven months ago. I'm also pretty sure that he never came up with anything like the Body Regenerator Tesla Coil, which starts out…
oracknows | November 15, 2007Earlier this week, I did a couple of posts about applying evolutionary principles to the meme of complementary and alternative medicine. In one of them, I mentioned how CAM therapies never seem to "go extinct." They may wax and wane in popularity and "evolve" into other therapies, but they never go extinct. PalMD of Whitecoat Underground has noticed the same thing and has posed a question and a challenge:
So today I issue a challenge to both of my readers. Find me examples of "alternative" medicine that have been abandoned because evidence showed them to be failures. Post away, but please…
oracknows | November 15, 2007Yesterday's mega-post left me a bit drained; consequently I've throttled my ambitions back a notch today in order to leave some energy to put together the weekly installation of Your Friday Dose of Woo tomorrow. Fortunately, just the topic presented itself: A story that's interesting and instructive (hopefully) but that won't take as much of my time to deal with.
But first, a brief recap. A couple of months ago, I discussed a highly dubious fundraising e-mail that was going around, apparently pushed by an organization known as Natural Solutions Foundation, about what seemed on first blush to…
oracknows | November 14, 2007Over the last couple of days, I've discussed "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) in terms of a meme upon which evolutionary forces are acting to select certain forms of woo over others in academia. Although, in my usual inimitable fashion, I probably carried the concept one step too far, in the end I concluded that the relationship between CAM and academic medical centers is probably best characterized as parasitic rather than symbiotic.
After I finished that post, I started thinking (always a dangerous thing). Regular readers know that I've sometimes raised a bit of a ruckus by…
oracknows | November 13, 2007I was always wondering when he'd finally weigh in on alternative medicine, and now Sid has.
It's a slapdown worthy of Orac, Dr. R.W., or Panda Bear MD.
Go forth and read it. Not quite as snarky as Orac (but, then, Sid's a classy guy), but every bit as outraged.
oracknows | November 13, 2007Today's the day, everyone.
I haven't mentioned this before, but the documentary on the trial over the teaching of "intelligent design" creationism in the classroom in Dover, Pennsylvania two years ago is set to premiere on your local PBS station tonight at 8 PM. The Nova documentary, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, already has the Discovery Institute up in arms because from all reports thus far (and indeed from the content of the documentary website, which presents fossil evidence and a detailed discussion of evolution) it is uncompromising in its viewpoint that ID is not science…
oracknows | November 13, 2007Yesterday, inspired by a post by fellow ScienceBlogger Martin, I had a little fun discussing the evolution of "alternative" medicine (a.k.a. "complementary and alternative medicine" or CAM), specifically speculating about the possible selective pressures, positive and negative, that have influenced the course that its evolution took. Essentially, the discussion centered around whether, by its very nature CAM undergoes negative selective pressure for having as little effect as possible, positive or negative, a point I found somewhat, but not entirely, convincing. Although the post inspired a…
oracknows | November 12, 2007I wish I had thought of this one, but I didn't. However, I never let a little thing like not having thought of an idea first to stop me from discussing it, and this particular idea is definitely worth expanding upon because (1) it's interesting and (2) it combines two of my interests, alternative medicine and evolution. I agree with parts of the idea, but it's not without its shortcomings. Indeed, I'd very much welcome any of the evolutionary biologists who read this blog to chime in with their own ideas.
Fellow ScienceBlogger Martin Rundkvist over at Aardvarchaeology has proposed a rather…
oracknows | November 9, 2007Orac gets e-mail from time to time. This time around, a person working at The Ohio State University writes about a disturbing incident there demonstrating yet more evidence that academic medical centers are having increasing difficulty distinguishing between evidence-based medicine (which they should champion) and non-evidence-based medicine, which they should not. This e-mail comes from someone who wishes to remain anonymous:
Time after time I've read Orac's accounts of woo infiltrating the medical community. Last month I witnessed its encroachment into the Ohio State University. Each year…
oracknows | November 9, 2007Now this is unexpected.
Normally, I find my victims/targets/subjects for my usual end-of-the-workweek bit of fun and skepticism from one of two sources. Either a reader sends a link to some woo or other that desperately deserves a little bit of Orac's loving attention, or in my wanderings across blogosphere I find some little (or huge) bit of woo that catches my attention and holds it long enough to make the case for a spot on my weekly feature. This time around it was different. While applying a sorely needed bit of skepticism to a story that's been going around the more credulous parts of…
oracknows | November 8, 2007It's Thursday, and I can hardly believe that it's time for the Skeptics' Circle again. Time flies between these every other week exercises in critical thinking. This time around, it's Holford Watch that's hosting the 73rd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. However, before you can enjoy skeptical bloggy goodness submitted to the carnival, you're asked to answer a little questionnaire to verify that you're of the proper mind (or maybe the improper mind) for all the posts contained therein. (Particularly amusing is this homeopathic investigation.)
Don't forget that it won't be long before the next…
oracknows | November 8, 2007I hadn't intended to write about this again, at least not for a while, but curiosity got the better of me. About a month and a half ago, I discussed a highly dubious story that was going around by e-mail about a 17-year-old boy with melanoma whose mother supposedly "cured" him with "natural" treatments. As you might imagine, the story was riddled with incorrect-sounding medical information and inconsistencies. Earlier this week, through a highly credulous blogger going by the 'nym the Angry Scientist, I became aware of an update to the story, in which the names of the mother and child (Laurie…
oracknows | November 7, 2007Along with Dr. R. W., I've become known for my rather vociferously expressed dismay at the ever increasing infiltration of unscientific and non-evidence-based woo in the form of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) into academic medical centers. Well, thanks to a reader, I've seen a vision of the future of American medicine, and it's frightening. Imagine, if you will, an academic medical center where the infiltration of woo is complete, where all manner of "alternative" modalities are viewed as equal or even superior to our unfeeling and nonwholistic scientific medicine.
Imagine, if…
oracknows | November 7, 2007This is getting depressing.
Yesterday, I did a brief post on the tragic story of a nine month old baby named Gloria Thomas whose father, a homeopath, put his faith in homeopathic medicines to treat her severe eczema and who as a consequence did not receive the necessary medical treatment she needed and died of massive sepsis, probably from a staph infection of her skin. It was clearly a case where faith in an irrational and unscientific system of medicine directly contributed to an unnecessary death by delaying necessary care.
But misguided faith in alternative medicine is not the only kind…
oracknows | November 6, 2007Panda Bear MD has posted the second part of his series about the irrationality behind much of "alternative" (a.k.a. non-evidence-based) medicine. He makes an excellent point:
At no time however, will your physicians ever promise a magic cure, a therapy that will definitively fix the problem with no ill effects leaving alone the precarious balance of your fantastically complicated body. At best they will promise good results with minimal and easily tolerated side effects. At worst the therapies they will reluctantly propose are almost as bad as the disease they will ameliorate and the subject…
oracknows | November 6, 2007Over the weekend, it appears that a post of mine, in which I included a link to a video of comic Tim Slagle doing the comedy routine that, in my never-ending effort to live up to the stereotype of the humorless skeptic that the credulous like so much, I castigated for its misrepresentations of science in the pursuit of a punchline, has been invaded by a number of "skeptics" of anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, it makes me wonder if someone e-mailed the link to my post to a Libertarian mailing list or something, given that, as of this writing, no one that I can detect has linked to the…