complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | July 3, 2017One of the most persistent narratives latched on to by advocates of "integrative medicine" is that the "mind" can somehow "heal" the body. Sometimes, the claim is that such interventions work through "powerful placebo" effects. Sometimes it involves the abuse of emerging science, such overblown claims about what can be accomplished through epigenetic modifications of DNA and gene expression. While my wife and I were away on vacation last month, there was another example of this claim popping up in the media under headlines like these:
Mindfulness and meditation dampen down inflammation genes…
oracknows | June 28, 2017Before I delve into the next topic, I can't help but congratulate John Oliver yet again for his excellent deconstruction of the antivaccine movement on Sunday night. As I noted on Tuesday, it clearly hit the mark, given how angry one antivax blogger got over it. As of yesterday, over at that wretched hive of scum and quackery, that antivaccine crank blog known as Age of Autism, resident "Media Editor" Anne Dachel was still sputtering over Oliver's segment, labeling it Oliver's vulgar treatment of vaccine-injured and their families and posting a line about how allegedly "mocking and berating…
oracknows | June 27, 2017I know that a lot of you like John Oliver and watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver , and I do too. In particular, I love how he devotes 20 minute segments of his show to intelligent long form comedy about all sorts of issues, including scientific and medical issues, including issues that I never would have thought I was interested in. Indeed, there are lots of times when he covers news stories better than the news media. So when he did a segment on vaccines last night—and a segment that was longer than his usual major segments—you know I would be incredibly interested. Here's a video of…
oracknows | June 26, 2017Orac gets fan mail. Yes, as hard as it is to believe, my blog sometimes ticks certain people off, and sometimes I even hear from them. For instance, last week a reader wrote me. The subject header read, "Why do you hate naturopathic physicians so much?" and the letter went something like this (OK, exactly like this other than the name of the reader, which I've withheld, and to whom I will refer as "T"):
Having stumbled across one of your diatribes against licensed naturopathic doctors, I can't help but wonder what that profession has done to hurt you? If you have examined the evidence,…
oracknows | June 23, 2017Long time readers (and I do mean really long time readers) know that I used to do a regular Friday feature called Your Friday Dose of Woo. In the feature, I used to look for the silliest, woo-iest bits of quackery and pseudoscience that I could find, like quantum homeopathy, SCIO, Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface, or Magickal psychic amplification a-go-go. Over time, it got harder and harder to do that on a weekly basis, but I still think that, barring some new, deep, serious story, there's value to ending the week with something on a lighter note. Yes, I know, this is a rule or…
oracknows | June 21, 2017Courtrooms are generally not a good place to decide issues of science. I've said this more times than I can remember. Admittedly, courts can at times do pretty well with issues of science. The Vaccine Court is a good example, as is the Autism Omnibus decision, which ruled that the test cases brought before the Vaccine Court to determine if there was a plausible case to show a potential causative relationship between vaccines and autism. The court ruled against the test case complainants, even though the rules of evidence are those of a civil court, in which "50% and a feather" are all that is…
oracknows | June 20, 2017In pseudomedicine, fake diseases predominate. Basically, fake diseases are diseases that do not exist in conventional medicine as diagnostic entities because there does not exist sufficient sufficient evidence to support them as one or there exists compelling evidence that they are not. Naturopaths, for instance, like to diagnose people with "adrenal fatigue," which is one of the prototypical "fake diseases." Basically, it involves a constellation of vague symptoms that may include a combination of several of the following: fatigue, inability to handle stress, cravings for salty foods,…
oracknows | June 20, 2017If there's one form of quackery that is among the most "respected," it has to be acupuncture. I've often speculated about why this might be, and the best that I can come up with is that doctors are a bit more open to acupuncture because it involves sticking actual needles into the body. It's very easy to ignore the mystical, vitalistic BS about "redirecting the flow of qi" because doctors can easily handwave and postulate other, more scientific-sounding explanations, such as that it releases endorphins or adenosine. If that doesn't work, then acupuncturists add electricity and thereby rebrand…
oracknows | June 19, 2017Well, I'm back.
Hard as it is to believe, during my vacation I went a whole two weeks without writing a truly new post. That's something that hasn't happened in probably 12 years. Yes, as a result of the lack of original material for two weeks, my traffic appears to have taken a noticeable hit and is now lower than it's been in several years, but you know what? For the first time I actually don't really care that much. It was good to unplug. It's also good to be back, though.
Although we arrived home Saturday afternoon, I remain jet lagged, and it's also Father's Day, which means I need to…
oracknows | June 14, 2017Orac note: While Orac is on vacation (fear not, he'll be returning on Monday!), he's rerunning some of the "best of" the blog (if you can call it that). Actually, he's rerunning whatever strikes his fancy. This one struck my fancy because I used to use the term "altie" all the time, but haven't used it in years. It was a good shorthand for someone like Gwyneth Paltrow.
This post originally appeared on April 11, 2008; so some of the references are a bit dated, and some of the links no longer work. But the sentiment is true. Feel free to add your updates to the list until I return on Monday.
It…
oracknows | June 11, 2017If there's one thing about the march of the pseudomedical entity known as "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), "integrative medicine," "complementary and integrative medicine" (CIM), "complementary and integrative health" (CIH), it's that over the last 25 years or so its progress towards being mainstreamed has appeared utterly relentless.
I like to paraphrase Kyle Reese, the warrior from the future sent back in time to save Sarah Connor in The Terminator: "Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel…
oracknows | June 7, 2017Orac Note: While Orac is on vacation, he's reprinting some of his "classics" (if you can call them that). He's also trying (but not always succeeding) to pick posts that have never been "rerun" before. (Orac has his favorites, and every few years when he's on vacation he can't resist rerunning them.) In any case, I used to run a feature called "Your Friday Dose of Woo." Basically, it was designed to feature the most spectacularly ridiculous pseudoscience and quackery I could find. It ran for two or three years, pretty much every Friday, until I got tired of being boxed in having to find…
oracknows | June 6, 2017By the time you read this, I will have arrived at an undisclosed location somewhere in Europe. My 25th wedding anniversary is today, and to celebrate my wife and I planned a nearly two-week vacation flitting about Europe. I won't announce where exactly, given that I've irritated a couple of European cranks in recent months, but those of you who are Facebook friends or who follow me on Twitter will likely soon see mentions and/or photos of where we're vacationing.
As this day approached, I contemplated what to do with the blog. I thought about just shutting it down for two weeks, but hesitated…
oracknows | June 4, 2017This is the sort of story that I really hate but feel obligated to discuss. I hate these stories because they usually portend the unnecessary death of a cancer patient, often a child with cancer whose parents refuse chemotherapy or who refuses chemotherapy and is unfortunate enough to have a parent who either has alternative medicine proclivities herself, lacks the guts to tell the child that he's getting treated for his own good and he doesn't have a choice in the matter, or, in a couple of cases that I've discussed, conflates using indigenous people's medicine instead of chemotherapy as a…
oracknows | June 2, 2017I've discussed several times over the last several years my impression that the media have become in general less tolerant of antivaccine views. At least, the media seem less willing to indulge in "tell both sides" false equivalence. Back when I started blogging, I routinely used to bemoan how news stories about vaccines or autism would almost inevitably include obligatory quotes from antivaxer like J.B. Handley, Jenny McCarthy, and sometimes even Andrew Wakefield. More recently, over the last five years or so, such tropes seem a lot less common. I don't have any solid evidence to back up my…
oracknows | May 31, 2017As hard as it is to believe, it was over seven years ago that I started my Annals of "I'm not antivaccine" series. The idea was (and continues to be) to point out how the claim that many antivaccine activists proclaiming themselves to be "not antivaccine" but rather "vaccine safety advocates" is, depending on the specific antivaxer making it, a lie, a delusion, or perhaps both. I do that by simply highlighting bits of over-the-top rhetoric I see on antivaccine websites likening vaccines to all sorts of evil things, particularly the Holocaust. In the case of the very first entry in this series…
oracknows | May 29, 2017Surprisingly, I made it through an entire three day weekend without posting anything to the blog. Believe it or not, this is a good thing. It means that I actually worked on my grant that's due at the end of the week. Still, a blogger's gotta blog; so I can't just shut down until the end of the week. So, hwere we go.
I've long lamented the creeping infiltration of quackery into medical academia in which modalities once considered quackery, such as acupuncture, reiki, naturopathy, homeopathy, and various other dubious treatments, have found their way into what should be bastions of science-…
oracknows | May 25, 2017When I first started to take an interest in medical marijuana, I was struck by how much it reminded me of herbalism. Although herbalism is scientifically the most plausible of modalities commonly associated with "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), the use of herbal medicines still involve a number of problems, the biggest of which is what I like to call either the delivery problem or the bioavailability problem. In brief, herbs, when they work, are adulterated drugs. The active ingredient is often a relatively small, embedded in thousands of other constituents that make up herbs,…
oracknows | May 23, 2017I hesitated over discussing this story because it only comes from one source and that source is not one that I normally trust, The Washington Free Beacon. It might be fake news. On the other hand, it is a story that is not implausible and appears to be reasonably well reported, complete with a reproduction of an invitation to the event being reported on. Moreover, even though this particular source is unabashedly conservative and partisan, it has done some reporting that even Nick Baumann at Mother Jones admitted to be pretty good. So it is with a little bit of trepidation that I note this…
oracknows | May 22, 2017As much as I like to deconstruct pseudoscientific claims, particularly about health, medicine, and health care, Sometimes it gets a bit draining. There's just so much pseudoscience, so much credulity, so much sheer idiocy out there that trying to refute them and encourage a more skeptical mindset often feels like pissing into the ocean, for all the effect it has. In the age of fake news and Donald Trump, it even feels as though we're going backward—and not slowly, either. That's why I felt it was time for a bit of a break, a bit more optimism than I've been able to muster before. So it was a…