complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | April 5, 2007An "integrative" medical practitioner observes:
I just came from a lecture by a Chinese Prof. who has a cancer hospital in China (Fuda Cancer hospital). What is strange, was it didn't use therapies from China, but rather technologies from the USA. They have cryoablation, photodynamic therapies, dendritic cell therapies, immunotherapy as well as chemoablation.
They claimed to have a very good success rate in increasing survival. Patients from all over have come to this hospital in Guangzhuo.
Why is he surprised?
As I've pointed out before, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is losing out to…
oracknows | April 1, 2007Given that my attempt last year to pull an April Fool's Day gag fooled no one and in essence went over like the proverbial lead balloon, I'm chastened enough not to try it again this year. Maybe by next year, I'll get up the nerve again.
In the meantime, this little gem came through a mailing list that I'm on, and I wanted to see what my readers thought of it:
Redondo Beach Surfer News. Where the sun shines most the time, and the feelin' is laid back.
Sunday Apr 1, 2007. 5:40am
Chiropractic treatment fights global warming
by Olga Re
With the specter of global warming on the horizon, many…
oracknows | March 30, 2007It is with some trepidation that I approach the latest target of Your Friday Dose of Woo.
No, it's not because the woo is so potent that it has actually struck the fear of You-Know-Who in me (I leave it up to readers to determine whether I was referring to God or Valdemort), although it is indeed potent woo. Nor is it that the woo is boring woo (there's a reason why "power of prayer" kind of woo usually doesn't make it into YFDoW unless there's a really entertaining angle to be targeted). No, it's because this particular woo seems to combine genetics with systems biology (I kid you not),…
oracknows | March 27, 2007I've lamented time and time again how woo has been infiltrating American medical schools, even going so far as to find its way into being totally integrated into mandatory curriculum from the very first term of the first year of medical school at Georgetown. I realize I'm a bit late on this one, but sadly it's not just the U.S. where pseudoscience, anti-science, and woo are infiltrating universities. In the U.K., it's starting too:
Over the past decade, several British universities have started offering bachelor of science (BSc) degrees in alternative medicine, including six that offer BSc…
oracknows | March 26, 2007There hasn't been much news in the last two or three months about Abraham Cherrix, the 16-year-old with Hodgkin's lymphoma who rejected conventional chemotherapy, first in favor of the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy and then for the ministrations of a radiation oncologist in Mississippi named Dr. Arnold Smith, who combines non-woo (low dose radiation therapy) with woo (a form of "immunotherapy" involving "belly plaques" that has no evidence showing efficacy, not "more innovative techniques, such as immunotherapy, which uses medications and supplements to boost the immune system," as the…
oracknows | March 24, 2007Regular readers will know my opinion of Reiki or "energy healing." No need to rehash it here, at least not at the moment. But if you're a believer and looking for a Reiki practitioner, Reiki Blogger has some suggestions for you of things that "are NOT OK" in a first Reiki session:
I recently read what I can only say was a very disturbing account of a persons first ever reiki session. The person went along to a "friends" husband who was, as well as a reiki person, a medical doctor.
Now, you would expect to be reasonably confident to follow this persons instructions. Well, think again. He asked…
oracknows | March 23, 2007It's been another eventful week on the ol' blog, staring out with a post on despereate cancer patients self-experimenting with dichloroacetate, continuing on to do another fisking of the anti-evolution neurosurgeon and discussing real individualization of treatments, provided a little basic cancer biology, and ended up with some of the first straight medblogging that I've done in a long time. And then things finished up with the depressing news that Elizabeth Edwards' breast cancer has recurred in her rib and possibly in her lung. Things have somehow gotten a bit too serious around here, even…
oracknows | March 22, 2007[Note: The following is based on an aggregation of multiple patients. It does not represent any single patient's case.]
It was a little case.
I know, I know, I've said in the past that there's no such thing as a little operation, at least not when it's happening to you, and that's true. Nonetheless this case was as close to "minor surgery" as you could get while still actually having to wield a scalpel to cut through skin. As I spoke to her before the operation to get informed consent, the patient ran her fingers across her short hair, only now starting to grow back after her having completed…
oracknows | March 21, 2007Late yesterday afternoon, I was lazily checking my referral logs to see who might be linking to Respectful Insolenceâ¢, as most bloggers like to do from time to time (and any blogger who claims otherwise is probably feeding you a line), when I noticed a fairly large number of visits coming from one location, namely here. I was wondering when this would happen, but it looks as though the regulars at The DCA Site have finally noticed some of my writing. Surprisingly, what they say about me is not that bad, although that's probably because they seem to have found the least--shall we say?--…
oracknows | March 20, 2007The longer I maintain this blog, the more I find unexpected (to me, at least) intersections and relationships between various topics that I write about. Of course, a lot of it simply has to do with the fact that one of the overarching themes of this blog is skepticism and critical thinking, which leads one to seek patterns in various pseudoscience, but sometimes it's a little more interesting than that. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the "individualization" of treatments in "alternative" medicine and how it's largely a sham that alt-med practitioners claim that their…
oracknows | March 19, 2007It figures.
Whenever I go away for a conference, things of interest to me that I'd like to blog about start happening fast and furious. Indeed, I could only deal with one of them, and I chose to post my challenge to the Paleyist "intelligent design" creationist surgeon, Dr. William Egnor. Now that I'm back, I'll deal with the other major issue that's been a frequent topic of blogging over the last couple of months and bubbled up again into the blogosphere over the weekend.
Remember all the posts that I did on dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent that targets the…
oracknows | March 18, 2007I'll be on the road as this posts. However, for your edification, enjoy a tag-team smackdown of some truly ignorant "mercury causes autism" evidence-free handwaving, courtesy of Dad of Cameron and Not Mercury. In keeping with the theme of twos, it's done in two parts, separated by two weeks:
Part 1: A Hot Cup of Jack Squat
Part 2: Wagnitz Pours a Second Cup
oracknows | March 17, 2007Reflexology, as you may know, is the pseudoscientific "alternative medicine" modality whose central dogma is that each body part or organ maps to a certain place on the feet or hands and that by pressing on those locations on the feet (for example), the reflexologist can have a therapeutic effect. The question, however, is: Why the feet? I mean, why not other parts of the body? For example, there's a part of the body that's larger than the feet, and mapping different parts of the body to it makes just as much sense as mapping them to the feet. I'm referring to butt reflexology (warning:…
oracknows | March 16, 2007Ah, yes, Washington, DC.
That's where I am right now, deep in the belly of the government beast, attending the meeting of The Society of Surgical Oncology. It's usually a great meeting, except for the distressing tendency of surgeons here to act, well, too much like surgeons. For example, consider when the very first session today, which happened to be about my area of interest breast cancer, started. Was it 8 AM? No. 7 AM? No.
It was 6 AM.
I kid you not. 6 AM in the freakin' morning! The week after the switchover to Daylight Savings Time, yet! There was a time when I used to actually get up…
oracknows | March 15, 2007If not, then American Medical Student Association's got it for you, all in a nice, compact 15 page pocket manual. True, there's some standard advice about diet and some useful information about herbal remedies, but there's the now usual (from AMSA, anyway) credulous treatment of all sorts of woo, including homeopathy, Reiki, fasting, vitamin supplements, reflexology, and naturopathy. All the woo you need to know, all in a little manual you can stuff in the pocket of your labcoat.
(Hat tip, as is usual for AMSA-related woo, to Dr. R.W.)
oracknows | March 15, 2007You may recall Dr. Lorraine Day, the former Chief of Orthopedic Surgery at San Francisco General Hospital in the 1980's who, after developing breast cancer, became a consummate altie, selling various dubious "natural, alternative therapies for all diseases, including cancer and AIDS." Somewhere along the line, sadly, she also became a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. I've had an interest in her conspiracy-mongering for a while now, because she's the perfect storm of two of my biggest interests: "alternative medicine" and Holocaust denial. I used to refer to her as purveying both…
oracknows | March 13, 2007I'm on the record multiple times as saying that I reject the entire concept and nomenclature of "alternative medicine" as being distinct from "conventional" medicine as a false dichotomy, when in reality there should be just "medicine." Moreover, this "medicine" remaining should, whenever possible, be based on sound scientific and clinical trial evidence. In essence, I advocate treating "alternative" medicine the same as "conventional" medicine subjecting it to the same scientific process to determine whether it has efficacy or not, after which medicine that is effective is retained and used…
oracknows | March 10, 2007Well, not exactly "no comment." You know that Orac, being the annoyingly obnoxious skeptic that he is, has to put at least two cents in.
This one's just plain odd. I knew Rosie O'Donnell's not exactly the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, and she also borders on being a creduloid, at least with respect to almost buying the myth that mercury in vaccines causes autism (although she does get props for slapping down David Kirby) and waxing antivax about Gardasil, the new vaccine against human papilloma virus. But last week, she revealed that she has been using "inversion therapy" for years to…
oracknows | March 9, 2007It's Friday, which means that it's time once again to delve deeply into the world of woo, all for your edification and (I hope) education. Even though I started out with less motivation than usual for tending to the blog, it actually turned out to be yet another rather eventful and surprisingly productive week on the old blog, with topics ranging from plumbing the depths of antivaccination lunacy, to doing some nice straight science blogging about the anticancer drug dichloroacetate (which actually gave me some ideas for my research), to discussing the "individualization" of treatments in…
oracknows | March 7, 2007I've posted many times about the pseudoscience of the mercury militia, that group of parents, bolstered by those Don Quixotes tilting at the mercury windmills in the cause of extracting more money from the government to compensate "vaccine-injured" children with autism, Mark and David Geier. These and other luminaries of the mecury militia blame vaccines for lots of bad things, be it autism, immune problems, "autistic enterocolitis," and generalized "mercury toxicity," all the while asserting piously (and, most amazingly of all, with a straight face) that, oh no, they aren't in any way "…