complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | March 10, 2006It's good to see the Pooflinger back in action. It really is. I don't even mind that he's starting to muscle in on my territory, because, as he points out, alties need poo-love too. In the process He's unearthed a "gem" of altie wackiness that even I had never encountered before.
Better still, he's returned to deconstructing that tome of creationist nuttiness, The Evolution Cruncher.
oracknows | March 6, 2006Curse you, Mark and David Geier.
I'm getting tired of having to subject my scientific and critical thinking skills to the assaults on science and reason that you routinely publish in dubious journals to use as weapons in your apparently never-ending crusade to extract as much money as possible out of vaccine manufacturers and the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Dissecting your pseudoscientific claims causes me pain, not so much that I'm driven to take a hiatus from blogging, as Matt was by Kent Hovind's creationism, but almost.
I had hoped to let this cup pass, given how much I've…
oracknows | March 2, 2006I had wanted to let this cup pass, but couldn't, not after several readers e-mailed it to me and I went and experienced its inanity first hand. As Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, Part III: "Just when I thought I was finally out, they drag me back in again!" In this case, it was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who did the dragging.
Yes, RFK Jr. has dropped one more steamy, stinky turd on the blogosphere. No, it's not nearly as big and stinky as the first one that he dropped back in June, but that's almost certainly only because it's a short blog piece, rather than a full feature article for…
oracknows | March 1, 2006A while back, I wrote about Airborne, the "herbal" concoction designed by a schoolteacher that is touted as preventing colds and the flu if taken preemptively or lessening their severity if taken early on in the course of a cold. I concluded that there was no evidence that it did what Victoria Knight-McDowell, a schoolteacher and the creator of Airborne, claims. Now the company itself seems to be admitting as much. It turns out that the company commissioned a study to "prove" Airborne's efficacy, and its results did seem to show a mild positive effect on colds. Unfortunately, the study was…
oracknows | February 23, 2006While I'm busy plugging blogs I like, I thought I'd mention that A Photon in the Darkness is another one of my favorite skeptical blogs. Lately, in all the turmoil over my move to ScienceBlogs, I failed to mention two good pieces that Prometheus has posted in the last few days:
Why anecdotes aren't data (I suspect this one will really annoy a certain lurker who occasionally likes to trash me on his blog)
and
Opinions are like...; everybody's got one
Of the two, the second is my favorite, because he does quite a nice takedown of the apparent belief among many alternative medicine devotees (and…
oracknows | February 22, 2006What is it about the Avian flu that seems to inspire all sorts of wild craziness? Yes, the avian flu has the potential to be a big problem in humans (but is not one yet--so far its main lethal affect has been in birds). Yes, if it ever acquired the ability to be transmitted from person to person, rather than only from bird to human, it could cause a pandemic as nasty as the 1918 influenza pandemic, but, as far as can be determined, it has not acquired such an ability yet. Nonetheless, the avian flu inspires a lot more kookiness than more likely threats, such as the return or emergence of a…
oracknows | February 17, 2006About a year ago, I introduced the blogosphere to a term that had become common on certain Usenet newsgroups. I can't take credit for coining the term, but I think I can take some degree of credit for disseminating it to a wider audience.
That term is "altie," and has a meaning similar to the term "woo-woo," in that it describes people who are so militantly pro-alternative medicine and so distrustful of conventional medicine that they will never admit when conventional medicine is effective and refuse ever to concede that any alternative medical practitioner might, just might, possibly be a…
oracknows | February 13, 2006As promised, here is the first list of links of "classic insolence" from the old blog. For new readers, this is a place to start as far as my writings about quackery and dubious alternative medicine:
What is an "altie"?
Understanding alternative medicine "testimonials" for cancer cures
Battling quackery in conventional medicine
How can intelligent people use alternative medicine?
The Orange Man
How not to win friends and influence people
Polio returns, thanks to anti-vaccination zealots
Antivaccination rhetoric running rampant on the Huffington Post (Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6)…