complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | November 5, 2007For those who argue that homeopathy is harmless, here's a story that shows what can happen when faith in quackery results in parents eschewing effective evdience-based medicine:
NINE-MONTH-OLD Gloria Thomas was in such distress that her crying alarmed some passengers on a plane trip from India to Sydney.
She had been overseas for two months receiving medical treatment, and homeopathic medication from an uncle for severe eczema.
But in that time she missed two appointments which separate doctors had made for her at specialist dermatologists.
In May 2002, less than 10 days after her return, she…
oracknows | November 5, 2007This is true with respect to chiropractic, anyway. Just get a load of this ad from 1922:
(Click on picture for a larger image.)
You know, tart this ad up with some color and better graphics, and it wouldn't be out of place today making claims like this:
Fastest growing healing profession, outstripping all others. CHIROPRACTIC is today far in the lead of all other drug-less methods. In greater numbers than ever before intelligent people are seeing the light; they know that CHIROPRACTIC is practical, sane and gets results in treatment of disease. Endorsed by leading educators. Demand for…
oracknows | November 5, 2007About a month and a half ago, I discussed an e-mail that was being propagated far and wide that described the case of the mother of a 17 year old male who, or so the e-mail claimed, cured her son of stage IV melanoma using "natural means" and was supposedly thrown in maximum security prison by the Department of Child Services in California for "failing to properly care for her child." The e-mail, which was being used by an organization called Natural Solutions USA or Health Freedom USA (I was never quite sure), reproduced here, described what seemed on the surface to be a truly horrific abuse…
oracknows | November 3, 2007If you think Orac's insolence doesn't live up to the name of this blog, at least when it comes to lamenting the infiltration of unscientific, non-evidence-based modalities into academic medicine, such as the use of reiki in a top academic trauma hospital, woo finding its way into the mandatory curriculum of a prestigious medical center and becoming more prevalent in the elective curriculum of others (even to the point of credulous acceptance of quackery such as homeopathy), woo being trumpeted by the largest medical student organization in the U.S., and even what I thought to be the most…
oracknows | November 2, 2007In retrospect, I feel a little guilty about last week's edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. As a couple of commenters pointed out, the guy responsible for the woo seems as though he's a bit disturbed, as evidenced by the ransom note-style literature on his website and the news story that mentioned how his family didn't take him seriously and he was divorced. On the other hand, the woo was truly top notch. As I pointed out, it also illustrated how a woo-meister can take a single erroneous idea about human physiology and run with it far beyond what anyone would think possible. Such woo can be…
oracknows | November 1, 2007Despite the diatribes that appear here on a regular basis bemoaning the unscientific and sometimes dangerous claims made for so-called "alternative medicine" modalities, I'll be among the first to admit that in some cases it's not always clear what is "alternative" about some therapies. Indeed, there seems to be an intentional effort to "rebrand" some aspects of conventional medicine as being "alternative." Because these methods have a scientific rationale and at least some evidence that they work, by successfully marketing them as "alternative," woo-meisters can then point to them as…
oracknows | October 31, 2007Having gotten into the whole idea of blogging about peer-reviewed research yesterday and even using a spiffy new icon to denote that that's what I'm doing, originally I had planned on looking up another interesting article or pulling one from my recent reading list and blogging about it. Then, realizing that Breast Cancer Awareness Month is over after today, I happened to come across an article that reminds me of something that's appropriate for today, namely Halloween. Yes, it's that mercury maven of mavens, that tireless crusader who thinks he found that the Amish don't get autism and,…
oracknows | October 26, 2007As usual, Cectic nails it (click on comic for the full-size version):
Although I find it odd that the "mark" in the above comic would be calling for his checkbook rather than his credit card, it never ceases to amaze me how skeptical some people can be when dealing with financial matters while at the same time being so prone to magical thinking when it comes to "alternative" medicine.
oracknows | October 26, 2007Some woo is very, very complicated. The reason, of course, is that the often self-contradicting complexity of this sort of woo serves to make it harder for people without specialized training to figure out easily that it makes no sense scientifically. It's more a matter of baffling 'em with bullshit than because such complexity is actually needed. (No one that I can think of personifies this better than Lionel Milgrom, a man who's a veritable poet of woo.) Other times, the concept behind the woo is simple. In fact, it's usually just one idea. In fact, this one idea is usually based on an…
oracknows | October 25, 2007This has been a bad week at skeptics' school. Apparently, skeptical bloggers have been misbehaving left and right. Apparently we as the skeptical blogosphere have been very, very naughty indeed. Worse, the essays that we've handed in are apparently not pleasing to the teacher. Worst of all, we've been mischievously copying a screed against homeopaths and dispersing it far and wide across the blogosphere. Fortunately, Le Canard Noir is there to oversee detention in the 72nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle over at the quackometer blog. Head on over to detention and see what's going on.
Also,…
oracknows | October 24, 2007Wow, after my post about Le Canard Noir's being threatened with legal action for criticizing the Society of Homeopaths, I'm glad to know that I won't be being sued for having reposted his criticism.
Whines the Society of Homeopaths:
The Society of Homeopaths took the content of the 2006 BBC Newsnight programme on malaria very seriously and responded via press statements and media interviews promising action if it were required. We contacted the programme makers directly to ask for their evidence that any Society members had given dangerous or misleading advice to members of the public. They…
oracknows | October 23, 2007Regular readers know that I've long been disturbed by the increasing infiltration of non-evidence-based "alternative" medical therapies into academic medical centers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). I've come across another example of how much this has occurred. This time around, it's come in the form of a "debate" being held at 2 PM on Thursday, October 25 at the University of Connecticut Health Center entitled Homeopathy: Quackery Or A Key To The Future of Medicine? It's being touted thusly:
On October 25, 2007, the University of Connecticut Health Center will be hosting a historic debate on…
oracknows | October 22, 2007I was thinking of calling this post Jenny McCarthy and Julie Deardorff: Two crappy tastes that taste crappy together, but I've already used that joke with Jenny McCarthy and Oprah Winfrey. Besides, Julie Deardorff isn't nearly as famous as Oprah, although, as I've discussed before, she's probably even more credulous than Oprah towards the lastest dubious feel-good story about autism. Of course, this means that Deardorff and McCarthy are custom-made for each other, and, unfortunately, the antivaccination columnist for the Chicago Tribune has finally hooked up with the former Playmate of the…
oracknows | October 19, 2007DNA is an amazing molecule. How evolution could have, over eons, fashioned such an amazingly simple yet complex method of storing biological information and coding the proteins that carry out the functions of life is one of the great wonders of biology. Harnessing the power of DNA, through genetic engineering, the study of the genome, and epigenetics, has allowed scientists a deeper insight than ever before possible into diseases as diverse as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and inherited metabolic disorders, to name a few. I manipulate DNA in my laboratory, in order to make it do my bidding…
oracknows | October 18, 2007PZ seems to think that the whole "LOL" thing has gone too far. He may be right. In fact, I've even commented on it before.
Even though I have a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around the whole "LOLCats" phenomenon and its various bizarre spinoffs, I do have to admit that I've found one LOL spinoff that's pretty darned amusing.
Are you ready for LOLQuacks?
Some examples:
OK, I know the above has nothing to do with quackery, but as a fan of the Fantastic Four and a connoisseur of pareidolia, I couldn't resist. On with a few homeopathy-related examples:
This one is amusing because I…
oracknows | October 18, 2007Whatever criticisms I may have had for prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris otherwise, one area that I'm totally down with both of them on is their criticism of the undue respect and consideration we as a society give to religious ideas. This consideration is rarely, if ever, based on the merit of the ideas, but rather solely because they are religious ideas. Many of these ideas, if they were not based on religion, wouldn't be given anywhere near the respect or deference that they are now. But, because they are based on a faith in the supernatural, for some reason we as a…
oracknows | October 17, 2007I've written before about how one of the favorite tactics of those who do not like my insistence on applying skepticism, science, and critical thinking to the claims of alternative medicine or my refusal to accept a dichotomy between "alternative" and "conventional" medicine is to try so smear me as some sort of "pharma shill." It's happened so often ever since my Usenet days that I even sometimes joke about it preemptively sometimes when writing skeptical posts or make smart aleck comments asking where I can sign up to get those big checks from big pharma, given that they'd almost certainly…
oracknows | October 16, 2007Work and a conference intervene to prevent a fresh dose of Respectful Insolence today. Fortunately, there's still classic Insolence from the archives that hasn't been moved over to the new blog. This one originally appeared on March 7, 2005.
The short answer is: Yes. The long answer is below.
When I first posted on this yesterday, I had hoped things weren't as they appeared. Although representing himself as a free-thinking skeptic who proudly trumpets his atheism and calls religion a "neurologic disorder," Bill Maher has, sadly, apparently officially passed from the realm of "smug but…
oracknows | October 15, 2007It's rare that one sees an editorial this spot on, but it happened a couple of days ago in The Washington Post:
The debate over vaccine litigation has thus shifted from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt. While the number of major studies that have failed to find any substantive link between vaccines and developmental disorders or autism is now in the double-digits (including a September 27th CDC study in the New England Journal), critics are effectively demanding that scientists prove that thimerosal does not cause illness -- an impossible standard.
The very success of…
oracknows | October 15, 2007About a week ago, I wrote about how the wooiest of woo, reiki, has infiltrated one of the best academic trauma centers in the U.S. In it, I lamented that I was feeling increasingly alone in being disturbed by this infiltration of religious pseudoscience into bastions of scientific medicine.
Fortunately for me, Dr. RW is as dismayed as I am:
Out here in the hinterlands I can only wonder what's going on in academic medicine these days. Is there anyone there for whom the standards of science mean anything at all? Well, there must be. There are plenty of people who teach and write about evidence…