complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | October 12, 2014A few weeks ago, I wrote a post in which I explained why wearing a bra does not cause breast cancer. After I had finished the post, it occurred to me that I should have saved that post for now, given that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The reason is that, like clockwork, pretty much every year around this time articles touting various myths about breast cancer will go viral, circulating on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr like so many giant spider-microbes on the moon a week ago. Sometimes, they’re new articles. Sometimes they’re old articles that, like…
oracknows | October 10, 2014Well, Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014 (or, as I like to refer to it, Quackery Week) is fast drawing to a close; so I figured I’d end it with one last post. Since several of you liked my post a couple of days ago Sh*t naturopaths say and agreed with me when I suggested at the end that I ought to make this a recurring feature on the old blog here. So, how better to finish off Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014 than with another installment of Sh*t naturopaths say. In fact, I might even have to make it a tag. After all, I’m sure naturopaths will continue to provide me with quackery to deconstruct,…
oracknows | October 8, 2014
Quackery has been steadily infiltrating academic medicine for at least two decades now in the form of what was once called “complementary and alternative medicine” but is now more commonly referred to as “integrative medicine.” Of course, as I’ve written many times before, what “integrative medicine” really means is the “integration” of quackery with science- and evidence-based medicine, to the detriment of SBM. As my good bud Mark Crislip once put it, “integrating” cow pie with apple pie does not improve the apple pie. Yet that is what’s going on in medical academia these days—with a…
oracknows | October 8, 2014
I mentioned yesterday that this week is Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014, or, as I like to call it, Quackery Week. At the time, I wasn’t sure when or if I was going to do another post about the quackery that is naturopathy this week. I was going to play it by ear and see what came up. Then, one of my commenters mentioned this subreddit, Read what naturopaths say to one another. Conclusion: manipulative, poorly trained, and a threat to public health. Now, I’m not a big fan of Reddit, largely because I can’t figure out how to find things easily, and I hate the sheer ugly and user hostile…
oracknows | October 6, 2014
In my eagerness to note that Brian Hooker’s “reanalysis” of a ten year old study that failed to find a correlation between vaccines and autism had been retracted, I forgot to write about what I was originally planning on writing about yesterday. It actually would have been more appropriate a topic for yesterday, because it was the beginning of a week. In fact, it was the beginning of a very special week for a certain class of quacks. No, it’s not homeopathy week. Here’s a hint: Do any of you remember this time last year? Sure, I knew you did.
We’re talking Quackery Week 2014! I mean…
oracknows | October 5, 2014
These things always seem to happen on Friday. Well, not really. It’s probably just confirmation bias, but it seems that a lot of things I’d like to blog about happen on a Friday. That leaves me the choice of either breaking my unofficial rule not to blog on the weekend or waiting until Monday, when the news tidbit might not be quite so...timely anymore. This time around, I decided to wait because, well, we’re getting into grant season again, and I could use the time to work on grants.
It is, however, good news. Very good news indeed. Remember Brian Hooker’s absolutely incompetent “…
oracknows | October 3, 2014
Countering the misinformation regularly promulgated by the antivaccine movement, be it antivaccinationists who are completely off the deep end, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the crew at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, or that epitome of the Dunning-Kruger effect mixed with an annoying self-absorption and coffee klatch vibe (that is when it's not a wine party), The Thinking Moms' Revolution, or from seemingly more "reasonable" antivaccine advocates like pediatricians Robert "Dr. Bob" Sears or Dr. Jay Gordon. The reason is simple. Vaccines save lives. They prevent children from…
oracknows | October 2, 2014
As I mentioned yesterday, here it’s that time of year again: October. Breast Cancer Awareness Month. While the topic of my post then was how antivaccine activists have tried to glom on to the attention that Breast Cancer Awareness Month gets in order to create their fake “awareness month” known as “Vaccine Injury Awareness Month,” unfortunately antivaccinationists are not the only quacks who take advantage of the various “awareness” months to peddle their quackery. Naturally, because Breast Cancer Awareness Month is one of the oldest and definitely the best known of these various disease…
oracknows | October 1, 2014Normally, these days I greet the month of October with a mixture of anticipation and dread. The anticipation stems from October’s position as Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Now that somehow I’ve managed to have a variety of responsibilities with respect to how breast cancer is managed at our cancer institute, suddenly I find that I’m sometimes called upon to do media appearances, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month is one time we can use to get our message out about breast health and breast cancer detection and treatment, not to mention to highlight for the local media some of the cool research…
oracknows | October 1, 2014Orac is feeling a little under the weather. I appear to have caught some respiratory crud that’s going around, which, fortunately, isn’t so bad that I can’t go to work, particularly given that today is a lab/office day, but unfortunately made me feel too tired last night to create one of my usual peerless examples of insolent blogging. So this post will be a followup to yesterday’s post and a lead-in to a question I want to pose to you, my readers. Let’s make things a bit interactive.
First the followup. As you might recall, yesterday, I found an example that helps to illustrate why most…
oracknows | September 29, 2014
One of the things you can say to someone who is antivaccine that will really tick them off is to “call it like you see it” and call them antivaccine. Sure, there are a few antivaccine activists who are unashamed of being antivaccine, but most antivaccinationists, sensing that society in general quite correctly takes a dim view of people who threaten to allow the return of dangerous vaccine-preventable diseases. Indeed, as I’ve pointed out many times before, that’s why antivaccine activists try to hide behind claims that they are “vaccine safety advocates,” often signified by saying, “I’m…
oracknows | September 26, 2014
It’s been a bad week for celebrity quacks; that is, after starting out looking as though it would be a good week. For example, as I discussed a couple of days ago, contender for the title of world’s most brain dead antivaccine conspiracy theorist, washed up comedian Rob Schneider, having somehow managed to land a gig resurrecting his 20 year old “Richmeister” character (a.k.a. the “Makin’ Copies Guy”) in the service of an ad campaign for State Farm Insurance, found his ad dropped like the proverbial Ebola-laced bedding when State Farm was made aware of Schneider’s virulently antivaccine…
oracknows | September 25, 2014Ever since the latest outbreak of Ebola viral disease in West Africa, there has been panic that’s metastasized to the US, even though the risk of a major outbreak here is very low. Unfortunately, whenever there’s panic over a disease, whatever the disease is, there soon follows quackery in response to that panic, from quacks who are either looking to make a buck or who are true believers (or both). For instance, I’ve seen high dose vitamin C touted as an Ebola remedy. I’ve also written about deluded homeopaths claiming that homeopathy can be used to treat Ebola. One particularly deluded…
oracknows | September 24, 2014
I’m a State Farm customer. I have been for a very long time. To be honest, I’m not sure if it’s inertia or the discounts that State Farm gives me because I’ve been with the company for so long. On the other had, I’ve had no complaints. State Farm’s service has been fine, and on the couple of occasions I had to make a claim the company didn’t jerk me around. Even better, it didn’t raise my rates because of it. So I had no plans to change my home or auto insurance to another company. At least, such was the case until I saw this:
Yes, that’s Rob Schneider reprising his role as Richard…
oracknows | September 22, 2014
Quackery has been steadily infiltrating academic medicine for at least two decades now in the form of what was once called “complementary and alternative medicine” but is now more commonly referred to as “integrative medicine.” Of course, as I’ve written many times before, what “integrative medicine” really means is the “integration” of quackery with science- and evidence-based medicine, to the detriment of SBM. As my good bud Mark Crislip once put it, “integrating” cow pie with apple pie does not make the apple pie better. Yet that is what’s going on in medical academia these days—witha…
oracknows | September 18, 2014
This one will be much shorter than usual, mainly because I was out late last night for a dinner function at which I was on a panel of breast cancer experts. I must admit, even after having been an attending surgeon for 15 years, it never ceases to make me feel a bit weird to be presented as a “breast cancer expert”—or an expert at anything, for that matter. It’s rather like how I sometimes feel a bit weird that skeptic groups still invite me to give talks. Ten years ago, I sucked at public speaking. Now I’m apparently good enough that people want to hear me. Go figure.
In any event, I hate…
oracknows | September 17, 2014
As I so love to remind my readers, I’ve been at this blogging thing a long time now. In early December, it will have been a full decade since that strange, cold, dreary winter afternoon (well, technically late fall) when, inspired by an article in TIME Magazine about blogging, sat down in front of my computer, went to Blogspot.com and created the first iteration of Respectful Insolence. At first my output was intermittent, but within a couple of months I was posting virtually every day, a habit that’s continued to this very day. About a year after my very first post, I was invited to join…
oracknows | September 16, 2014
Of all the quacks and cranks and purveyors of woo whom I’ve encountered over the years, Deepak Chopra is, without a doubt, one of the most arrogantly obstinate, if not the most arrogantly obstinate. Sure, a quack like Mike Adams wins on sheer obnoxiousness and for the sheer breadth of crankery to which he ascribes, which includes everything from quackery, to New World Order conspiracy theories, to Scientology-like anti-psychiatry rants, to survivalist and gun nut tendencies, but he's so obviously unhinged, as well as intermittently entertaining, that he doesn't quite get under the skin the…
oracknows | September 14, 2014
In a past life, before I became so specialized, I was a general surgeon. Like all surgical oncologists and even breast surgeons, before I became a specialist, I had to do a general surgery residency. In addition to the usual cancer problems a general surgeon faces, the two most common being breast and colon cancer, I learned to deal with the most common non-cancer problems that general surgeons deal with, such as gallbladder problems, hernias, bowel obstructions, and the like. Unfortunately, those problems include anorectal problems (not my favorite!) including hemorrhoids.
Basically,…
oracknows | September 11, 2014
ORAC NOTE: I’ve added the links to the video segments, which are now up at the Dr. Oz website. I also did a screen grab of a certain really stupid thing that I noticed when I watched the segment but, because I was watching it on DVR, didn’t have the ability to show you. It’s near the end. Enjoy.
When last we left “America’s doctor,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, in June, he was having his posterior handed to him by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in a Senate hearing about the deceptive marketing of supplements in which his over-the-top promotion of supplements like Garcinia gambogia, green coffee bean…