complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | December 11, 2006Over a week ago, fellow ScienceBlogger revere fired a bit of a pot shot across my bow regarding my bow regarding a study regarding, of all things, chicken soup. Initially, it was at a bad time, when I had other things to do, having just labored mightily to produce the latest Hitler Zombie extravaganza, after which I had to lay low blogging for a while because of obligations midweek. When those obligations were over, then blogging about the Tripoli Six took precedence, as did this week's Your Friday Dose of Woo (which, by the way, is still overrun by the tinfoil hat brigade). And then I just…
oracknows | December 8, 2006Via The Second Sight, I find an example of a tool that, I suspect, many alties will find highly useful: The Woo World Self Treater. It'll allow you to diagnose yourself free from the boot of big pharma and the oppressive evidence-based medicine that close-minded "conventional" doctors like me advocate.
My results are below the fold:
Quantum-consciousness analysis of your auric field shows you are suffering the symptoms of Temporomandibular Joint Disorder, which is commonly seen among males born under the sign of Leo. This may also be due to alien implants. Magnet therapy has been shown to be…
oracknows | December 1, 2006It's been five months since I first started Your Friday Dose of Woo. I started it on a whim, after wondering if I should have a Friday feature, as so many other ScienceBloggers do (Friday Cephalopod, Friday Sprog Blogging, The Friday Fermentable, among others). In those five months, this thing has taken on a life of its own, producing woo more woo-ey than any that I had ever encountered before, woo like DNA activation, quantum homeopathy, Dr. Emoto's water woo, spiritually guided surgery, detoxifying boots, and the global orgasm. Sometimes the woo had religious overtones; sometimes it abused…
oracknows | November 28, 2006Remind me to mark April 10 down on my calendar. I never realized it was such an important day, and, in any case, I wouldn't want to miss it. Nor should the rest of the skeptical blogosphere. Why? It's World Homeopathy Day, "celebrated" (or, if you're a fan of evidence-based medicine, as I am, lamented) in "honor" of Samuel Hahnemann, the originator of homeopathy, who was born on April 10, 1755.
Oh, joy. (On the other hand, I'm sure I can think of some sort of blog fun to have next April 10.)
Homeopathy, as you may recall, is the "alternative" medical therapy in which, it is postulated, a…
oracknows | November 24, 2006One year ago today, I discovered a rather amusing bit of chicanery on the part of an old "friend," namely J. B. Handley, the proprietor of and driving force behind Generation Rescue, the group that claims that all autism (not just some, not just some, but all) is a "misdiagnosis" for mercury poisoning. Given that today is one year later to the day, I thought it would be amusing to repost this. And, yes, one year later to the day, the domain oracknows.com still redirects to Generation Rescue, although, shamed, J. B. did stop having the domain autismdiva.com redirect to GR.
INTERNET SQUATTER: J…
oracknows | November 24, 2006For the holidays, I thought I'd include a brief little bit of woo that seems not quite extensive enough for a full treatment in Your Friday Dose of Woo but is nonetheless a tasty woo morsel for your edification that fits in with the usual Thanksgiving theme of overindulgence in various foods and the deleterious effect such overindulgence can have on one's waistline. Here's one that I've never heard of before, namely ear stapling for weight loss:
Marie Fallaw says she lost 83 pounds in six months simply by "stapling" her ears.
The Mississippi entrepreneur, owner of Staple Lean LLC, has…
oracknows | November 22, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger Alex Palazzo has discovered autism quackery.
I'm hurt.
I'm hurt because apparently Alex doesn't read my blog. (Just kidding; I don't read every ScienceBlog, either, although I do read many of them and peruse the Last 24 Hours Feed regularly for topics of interest.) If he did, he'd know that simply giving useless RNA from yeast in supplements (it's useless because, as Alex points out in detail, RNA is highly unstable and broken down quickly in the stomach to its component ribonucleic acids) is actually one of the more benign forms of autism quackery. At least it probably…
oracknows | November 20, 2006I don't know about you, but I was getting a little tired of writing so often about the same topic last week, namely the insinuation of unscientific and unproven "alternative medicine" into the medical school curriculum and its promotion by the American Medical Student Association (AMSA). I had planned on giving the topic a rest for a while, but then on a mailing list to which I subscribe, an example came up of something so outrageously egregious that I had to post just one more time. (Dr. R. W., as usual, has beaten me to it, but I plan on going into it in a little more detail.) It's a…
oracknows | November 19, 2006A couple of days ago, I wrote a criticism of the increasing tendency to teach woo in American medical schools and then later followed up with a post questioning the contention that teaching woo has the benefit of improving the doctor-patient relationship. A physician going by the 'nym Solo Practitioner took umbrage:
As a physician, I find the anger with which this blog is written disturbing. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine was created by the NIH to provide grant money and motivation for research to be performed in these fields in order to apply evidence-based…
oracknows | November 18, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger (I'm not all that enamored of the term "SciBling") Abel Pharmboy has finally weighed in on the issue of alternative medicine woo finding its way into medical school curricula and its promotion by the American Medical Student Association, which Dr. RW, Joseph, and I have been discussing the last few days.
Besides using his experience in natural products medicine to discuss this issue, Abel asks a very pointed question from a patient's perspective:
So, someone like me who feels a doctor doesn't have time for them might approach any one of the growing number of integrative…
oracknows | November 16, 2006My recent post (coupled with similar posts by Dr. R. W. and Abel Pharmboy) about the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) and its credulous promotion of non-evidence-based alternative medicine while posing as being "skeptical" of big pharma brought this rejoinder from Joseph of Corpus Callosum, in which he took issue with one aspect of my suspicion of the promotion of woo in medical schools by AMSA. I have to strenuously disagree with nearly all of his points. Here's the first, and most easily dismissed:
They [Dr. R.W., Abel, and I] raise some valid points, although I would not be…
oracknows | November 13, 2006If you're a physician, there comes a certain point in your career when you start caring a lot more than you did about the next generations of physicians in the training pipeline. While you're in the middle of training, you are the next generation; besides, you're too worried about just getting through medical school, residency, and Board certification to be all that concerned about those behind you in the pipeline, anyway. Then, when you're early faculty, you're concerned about establishing yourself, getting your career on track, and, if you're in academics, getting promoted. True, physicians…
oracknows | November 10, 2006Let's get one thing straight.
There's just no way on earth that I can imagine topping last week's Your Friday Dose of Woo. I can only be as good as my source material lets me be (well, maybe a bit better), and Toby Alexander and his "DNA Activation" represented such unbelievably potent, bizarre, and concentrated woo that I can't imagine that I'll find its like anytime soon again, much less find something that tops it. Even if I were to find woo more potent than Toby's, it would probably rend the fabric of the space-time continuum. Of course, given his "multidimensional spectra of DNA…
oracknows | November 8, 2006Is there a connection between Scientology and the mercury militia? Kevin Leitch examines the evidence. As he points out, it's not as far-fetched as it might seem at first:
Everybody knows that Scientology has an almost rabid outlook on psychiatry and what they deem psychiatric labels. Its so bad that Xenu-lover John Travolta is allegedly hiding the fact of his son's autism for fear of offending his masters in Scientology.
Scientologists have a natural theoretical affinity with the mercury militia and in particular the DAN! ideology. They are firmly against medication and firmly in favour of '…
oracknows | November 8, 2006I've written before about how frequently alties like to point to testimonials as "evidence" that their treatments work. Indeed, from the very beginning, in one of the earliest posts I ever wrote, I explained just why breast cancer testimonials for alternative medicine should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Of course, most of these testimonials are either given by true believers or used by people selling alternative medicine, and they are used mainly to sell product. That's one reason why I've emphasized that evidence from well-designed clinical trials is the best way of assessing what…
oracknows | November 7, 2006After not having written anything about the case of Abubakar Tariq Nadama, the five year old autistic boy who died as a result of chelation therapy administered to him to "cure" him of his autism, I revisited the case last week in light of the State of Pennsylvania filing charges against Dr. Kerry, the "alternative medicine" practitioner who delivered the lethal dose. I've now gotten a copy of the full list of charges, and it makes for some interesting reading if you can stand all the legalese. (The charges can also be found here.)
Here's the note in Tariq's medical chart from his initial…
oracknows | November 3, 2006There are times when the struggle to keep cranking out Your Friday Dose of Woo every week starts to get to me. No, it's not because I don't enjoy putting together these little light-hearted but pointed analyses of some of the strangest woo that I've come across. Believe me, many times it's the highlight of my blogging week. It's just that, now that I've been doing this a while, no matter how hard I try to put something together the weekend before, so as to be ahead of the game, somehow I almost never quite manage to do it. Thus, all too frequently I end up writing away late Thursday night…
oracknows | November 2, 2006Suzanne Somers annoys me.
She annoys me because, despite the fact that her statements and activities over the last 25 years reveal her to be probably no more intelligent than the character that she played on Three's Company, she still feels the need to spread misinformation about diet and medicine in several books that she has written. Indeed, my annoyance at her was manifested very early in the history of this blog, when I mentioned her in the context of testimonials for alternative medicine treatments for breast cancer. The reason? In 2001, Somers was diagnosed with breast cancer. She…
oracknows | November 1, 2006I had been planning on finally getting around to writing that review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion that I've been meaning to write since I finally finished the book two weeks ago. Then a Google Alert hit my mailbox last night for a preset search that I keep active on "Abraham Cherrix," and the article that the link in the search results lead to not only contained a a disturbing amount of credulity towards alternative medicine (in the form of he-said-she-said "balance" when two outlooks are not anywhere near equally supported) but offered a positive portrayal of Abraham Cherrix and Dr.…
oracknows | October 31, 2006A little more than a year ago, an autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama died of a cardiac arrest due to hypocalcemia at the hands of an "alternative medicine" practitioner named Dr. Roy Kerry while chelation therapy was being administered to him intravenously. Dr. Kerry, who trained as an ENT doctor, now bills himself as an "allergist" and an alternative medicine practitioner. Tariq's tragic and unnecessary death lead to a round of posterior covering by mercury militia enabler David Kirby and a rather blithe acceptance and dismissal by some who routinely go ballistic whenever someone…