complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | February 20, 2015
You remember Dr. Bob, don't you?
I'm referring, of course, to Robert "Dr. Bob" Sears, the Capistrano Beach, CA pediatrician who's arguably the most famous of the antivaccine pediatricians who have been spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about vaccines. (Sorry, Dr. Jay, but, regardless of your being Jenny McCarthy's son's pediatrician, I'd bet that more people have heard of Dr. Bob than have heard of you.) Dr. Bob has achieved this fame/notoriety based on his book, The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for your Child, which is chock full of exaggerations about the dangers of…
oracknows | February 18, 2015
Ever since the Disneyland measles outbreak hit high gear last month and permeated the national consciousness, the antivaccine movement has, justifiably, been on the defensive. We've been treated to the spectacle of a truly despicable cardiologist spewing antivaccine nonsense with an added dollop of contempt for parents of children with cancer who are worried about the degradation of herd immunity by non-vaccinating parents driving vaccine rates down, leading to pockets of low vaccine uptake. We've had antivaccinationists likening vaccine mandates to human trafficking and rape. Then, of…
oracknows | February 18, 2015
It often comes as a surprise to proponents of alternative medicine and critics of big pharma that I'm a big fan of John Ioannidis. Evidence of this can easily be found right here on this very blog just by entering Ioannidis' name into the search box. Indeed, my first post about an Ioannidis paper is nearly a decade old now. These posts were about one of Ioannidis' most famous papers, this one published in JAMA and entitled Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research. It was a study that suggested that at least 1/3 of highly cited clinical trials may either…
oracknows | February 16, 2015
If there's one thing that's become clear to me over the years about acupuncture, it's that it's nothing more than a theatrical placebo. Many are the times that I've asked: Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Most recently, I asked this question in 2012. What science-based medicine answers is yes. However, there's a large contingent of physicians under the sway of practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) who have fallen under the spell of that theatrical placebo, leading to a whole subdiscipline of quackademic medicine in which…
oracknows | February 15, 2015 Baratunde Thurston and Zanny Minton Bedoes react to a particularly ignorant bit of antivaccine misinformation by Bill Maher on Real Time With Bill Maher. (February 13, 2015)
I really don't want Mondays to be come "let's refute and make fun of the conspiratorial antivaccine nonsense Bill Maher said on his show Friday night." I really don't. However, I figured that I might have to devote Monday to that one more time this week after Maher really let his antivaccine freak flag fly again for the first time in five years on his February 6 show. As a result of the criticism, Maher apologists…
oracknows | February 13, 2015If there's one good thing about the ongoing Disneyland measles outbreak that is continuing to spread, if there can be a "good thing" about an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease that didn't have to happen, it's that it's put the antivaccine movement on the defensive. They are definitely feeling the heat. Their reaction to that heat can range from ever more vigorously proclaiming that they are "not antivaccine" in a desperate bid to convince the unwary and those not familiar with the antivaccine movement that they are not antivaccine, all the while softening their antivaccine tropes…
oracknows | February 12, 2015
It's been a while since I've taken notice of Vani Hari, a.k.a. The Food Babe, the misguided "food safety" activist who sees chemicals, chemicals, chemicals everywhere and raises fears about them all, especially the ones that she can't pronounce. The first time I took any significant notice of her was about a year ago, when she was making news for lobbying Subway to remove the "yoga mat chemical" azodicarbonamide from its bread. Of course, as I explained, azodicarbonamide is a safe chemical that disappears during the baking. It's a maturing agent that makes bread dough rise better and…
oracknows | February 11, 2015
I think we've spent enough time on Bill Maher's antivaccine posturing for now. There really isn't much more to say for now. I'm sure he'll probably dump some pseudoscientific nonsense about medicine on his show to provide me with more blogging material. Today, I'm moved to revisit a certain cancer quack whose offenses are threatening to suck me into devoting as much attention to him in the coming days as I have over the last three years to Stanislaw Burzynski. I'm referring, of couse, to Brian Clement, the proprietor of the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida.
I first encountered Clement…
oracknows | February 10, 2015Sometimes, in order to understand advocates of pseudoscience, such as antivaccinationists, it's a useful exercise to look at their most extreme elements. Admittedly, in focusing on such loons, one does take the risk of generalizing the nuts to everyone a bit much, but on the other hand I've often found that the extremists are basically like the less loony versions on steroids. The advantage, to me, is that they are unconcerned (for the most part) with hiding the craziness at the root of their beliefs. While, for instance, SafeMinds of the merry band of antivaccinationists at Age of Autism (…
oracknows | February 8, 2015
Note added 2/10/2015: I've posted a followup in response to the skeptics who defend Bill Maher.
A couple of weeks ago, I noted the return of the antivaccine wingnut side of Bill Maher, after a (relative) absence of several years, dating back, most likely, to the thorough spanking he endured for spouting off his antivaccine pseudoscience during the H1N1 pandemic. This well-deserved mockery included Bob Costas taunting him on his own show with a sarcastic, "Oh, come on, Superman!" in response to his apparent belief that diet and lifestyle alone would protect him from the flu, as well as Chris…
oracknows | February 5, 2015
Well, the ongoing multistate measles outbreak that's been in the news for the last few weeks continues apace, which means I can't seem to stay away from the issue for more than a couple of days. For instance, yesterday I learned that five babies at a Chicago-area day care have been diagnosed with the measles. All the babies are under a year old and therefore too young to have received the MMR vaccine yet. At this point, I'm betting that most likely the baby who brought the measles to the KinderCare Day Care with this measles outbreak got it from an older unvaccinated sibling, but time will…
oracknows | February 2, 2015
"I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice as well. So that’s a balance the government has to decide.”
-- NJ Governor Chris Christie, February 2, 2015
"The state doesn't own the children. Parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom."
-- Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), February 2, 2015
Longtime readers know that I lived in central New Jersey for eight and a half years before taking an opportunity to return to my hometown just under seven years ago. Having spent the better part of a decade there, I think I understand New Jersey, at last the northern and…
oracknows | February 1, 2015
I swear, I had wanted to write about something else today. I really had. The reason is that we're in one of those stretches of time where things seem to be happening fast and furious that have led most of my posts over the last couple of weeks to be about the Disneyland measles outbreak, how it was facilitated by the antivaccine movement, and the fallout, both in terms of the measles outbreak continuing to spread and the pushback by antivaccinationists anxious to distance themselves from blame for the outbreak. Yes, I've written about "Dr. Bob" Sears, "Dr. Jay" Gordon, and, most recently,…
oracknows | January 30, 2015
Yesterday, I wrote about false balance in reporting on vaccines in the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak. For those who've never encountered this blog, what I mean by false balance is when journalists, in a misguided belief that there are "two sides" (i.e., an actual scientific controversy) about the safety of childhood vaccines and whether they cause autism and all the other ills blamed on them by antivaccinationists or not, interview an antivaccine activist, advocate, or sympathizer for "balance" and to "show both sides of the story." The problem with that technique, so deeply…
oracknows | January 29, 2015
Imagine, if you will, a time machine capsule going all the way back to the earliest days of this blog, back in 2005 and 2006. Now consider the antivaccine movement, which somehow I became very interested in very early, an interest that continues to this day. Do you remember one theme that I kept hitting again and again? Besides the pseudoscientific quackery often promoted by antivaccinationists, that is? That theme was false balance. Back when I first started blogging, no matter what the angle of the story, when the press reported about the topic of vaccines—or the topic of autism, for…
oracknows | January 28, 2015
If there's one aspect of 2014 that I enjoyed, it's that it was a very bad year for our old friend, America's quack, a.k.a. Dr. Mehmet Oz. It seemed that, finally, some of the chickens were coming home to roost and Dr. Oz was starting to suffer a bit for his promotion of quackery and pseudoscience on his daytime medical talkshow. The most delicious height of schadenfreude (for skeptics, at least) came mid-year, when Dr. Oz was asked to testify in front of Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill's Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation’s Subcommittee on Consumer Protection,…
oracknows | January 27, 2015
Here we are, into a new week, and the Disneyland measles outbreak continues to grow, the total number of cases now having topped 100 and the disease attributed to someone visiting Disneyland now having reached my state. More than ever, given the high proportion of victims who weren't vaccinated, antivaccinationists are feeling the heat. Rober, "Dr. Bob" Sears, MD might have been the most petulant one trying to downplay the seriousness of measles and then letting out a whole bunch of antivaccine dog whistles to his patients to let them know that, despite his assertion that the measles vaccine…
oracknows | January 25, 2015
It's no secret to my regular readers that it's highly unlikely that I'll ever be getting a job at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) any time soon. After all, I've written posts about the CCF in which I've criticized its promotion of reiki, its establishment of a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) herbal medicine clinic, complete with a naturopath running it, and its recent embrace of the founder of "functional medicine" (not to mention collaborator with antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) Dr. Mark Hyman. A quick Google would reveal me as the author of such criticisms. Such is…
oracknows | January 21, 2015
In the wake of antivaccine-pandering pediatrician "Dr. Bob" Sears' attempt to paint the measles as no big deal, so much so that it totally escaped his notice that it might not be a bad idea to recommend that the unvaccinated get the MMR vaccine in the midst of an outbreak, the bad news about the Disneyland measles outbreak just keeps coming in. Hot off the presses yesterday:
There are now 67 confirmed cases of measles in an outbreak centered in California, health officials said.
The California Department of Public Health said there are now 59 cases in the state – 42 that have been directly…
oracknows | January 21, 2015
Poor, poor, pitiful Dr. Bob.
For those of you not familiar with him, I'm referring, of course, to Robert "Dr. Bob" Sears, MD, the antivaccine-sympathetic (or, more appropriately, antivaccine-pandering) pediatrician in Capistrano Beach, CA (between Los Angeles and San Diego in Orange County) known for his Vaccine Book, a veritable font of antivaccine misinformation gussied up as a "reasonable" middle ground. Too bad it's not.
In any case, in the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak, Dr. Bob has found himself under a lot of criticism, along with our "good buddy," the other famous…