complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | September 10, 2014
Regular readers of my not-so-super-secret other blog, where I write under my own name, know that last month Steve Novella and I published a rather nice (if I do say so myself) opinion piece in a peer-reviewed journal about what we called “clinical trials of magic.” In it, we argued that certain alternative medicine modalities are so incredibly implausible from a purely basic science viewpoint, on physics and chemistry considerations alone, that it is a waste of time and resources, not to mention unethical, to do clinical trials testing them. Two of the main examples we used were homeopathy…
oracknows | September 9, 2014
There are some myths, bits of misinformation, or lies about medicine that I like to refer to zombie quackery. The reasons are obvious. Like at the end of a horror movie, just when you think the myth is finally dead, its rotting hand rises out of the dirt to grab your leg and drag you down to be consumed. Of course, the big difference between zombies and these bits of zombie quackery is that in most stories a single shot to the brain will kill the zombie. The same is not true of zombie quackery. You can empty clip after clip of reason, science, and logic into the “head” of the zombie…
oracknows | September 8, 2014
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I don't much like "Dr. Bob" Sears. Actually, I rather detest the guy. The reasons are obvious. There isn't an antivaccine trope Dr. Bob won't repeat in the service of pandering to the vaccine-averse parents base who bring him patients. They're all there in his The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for your Child and have been thoroughly deconstructed by pediatricians (and others) ranging from Paul Offit to John Snyder, the latter of whom quite appropriated dubbed Sears' book to be cashing in on fear. Basically, at ever turn, Sears either…
oracknows | September 5, 2014
Before I got sidetracked with a certain topic that’s consumed the blog, another topic that had popped up (albeit nowhere near as frequently) was the latest Ebola virus disease outbreak in Africa, the largest in history thus far. Indeed, as horrific as this outbreak is and as terrible a disease as Ebola is, with close to a 60% mortality even with the best treatment, it did produce one amusing bit of clownishness, and that’s that it revealed that there really is something too quacky even for Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com to tolerate.
I’m referring to an incident four weeks ago where a truly…
oracknows | September 4, 2014Orac post-publication note: There is reason to believe that one point I made below could well be incorrect. However, even leaving that point out, there are still many reasons to doubt the authenticity of the text exchange I discuss below. See the first 10 comments for a discussion. Unlike AoA and other antivaccine groups, if I am wrong about something, I will admit it and discuss what might have led me to an incorrect conclusion. Oh, and I missed something obvious (see comment #11). D'oh!
There’s something that’s been bothering me the last couple of days. I tried not to blog about it, but the…
oracknows | September 3, 2014
This post, although it is about an interview with a CDC scientist named William W. Thompson that resulted from the whole “CDC whistleblower” manufactroversy that’s been flogged relentlessly for the last two weeks, since antivaccine “heros” Andrew Wakefield and Brian Hooker released a despicable race-bating video flogging Hooker’s utterly incompetent reanalysis of a ten year old study that had failed to find an association between autism diagnosis and age of first vaccination, is about a more general issue as well, an issue that can apply to discussions of just about any trumped up risk,…
oracknows | September 1, 2014I know that when last I commented, I expressed the desire to move on from the topic of the CDC whistleblower case after having covered it for a week. And so was my intent. However, this being a holiday in the US and my having had an odd experience on Friday led me to think that one last update is in order. Those not familiar with the story can recap here:
Brian Hooker proves Andrew Wakefield wrong about vaccines and autism
Hey, where is everybody? The “CDC whistleblower” manufactroversy continues apace
The CDC “whistleblower” manufactroversy: Twitter parties and another “bombshell” e-mail
A…
oracknows | August 29, 2014
It is as I had feared. I must do one more post on a story that I’ve been blogging about for one solid week now. Hopefully after this, I will be able to move on to other topics last week, but after spending this whole week writing just about this, I figured, “What the heck? It’s Friday. Might as well make it a solid week and move on next week. I hope.” What am I referring to? Those familiar with the story, as in past installments, can skip the recap (but shouldn’t). I feel obligated to include one because of all the new readers who have appeared for these peerless bits of, in this case, not…
oracknows | August 27, 2014
They say that truth is stranger than fiction. I never really necessarily believed it, but yesterday was a day that might well serve as anecdotal evidence to support that adage. Indeed, yesterday was perfectly bookended by two major developments in the case of the so-called “CDC whistleblower,” the senior CDC scientist who, if you believe Andrew Wakefield and Brian Hooker (always a bad idea), over ten months unburdened himself to Hooker, a biochemical engineer with an autistic child whose autism he blames on vaccines, specifically mercury-containing vaccines. Because I’ve gotten a lot of…
oracknows | August 26, 2014Remember yesterday how, I referenced the ever-awesome bit about the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and how after pulling the pin you must count to three, no more, no less, before lobbing the grenade at thine enemies? The implication was, of course, that I was on my third post in a row about the so-called “CDC whistleblower” and that was enough.
I lied.
Well, no, actually I didn’t lie. (But look for a crank to quote mine that two-word sentence.) Rather, I changed my mind. The reasons are three-fold. First, this is a crank storm that just keeps on giving when it…
oracknows | August 25, 2014
Here it is, Tuesday already, and the antivaccine underground is still on full mental jacket alert over the biggest story the antivaccine movement has seen in a while. Fortunately, it’s a story that’s been largely ignored by the mainstream media, which tells me that maybe, just maybe, the mainstream media has figured out that it shouldn’t give undue credence to cranks. I’m referring, of course, to the claim that the CDC has for 13 years been covering up smoking gun evidence that the MMR vaccine when administered before 36 months causes autism in African-American males.
Ironically, as I…
oracknows | August 24, 2014
Occasionally, there are issues that come to my attention that need more than just one blog post to cover. One such issue popped up last week, and it’s one that’s kept you all very engaged, with the comment count on the original post rapidly approaching 200. I’m referring, of course, to the alleged CDC “whistleblower” who’s supposedly blown the lid on a “coverup” based on Brian Hooker’s incompetent “reanalysis” of a ten year old study (Destefano et al) that failed to find a link between age at MMR vaccination and the risk of developing autism. More specifically, given that Destefano et al…
oracknows | August 22, 2014
Here we go again.
If there's anything that ignites the fevered brains (such as they are) of antivaccine activists, it's a good seeming conspiracy. Indeed, as we've seen before, if they can't find a legitimate one, they'll either exaggerate one or make one up out of whole cloth. This week, an "alleged" conspiracy has been brewing. It's really the damnedest thing in that it's hard to figure out exactly what's going on. Whatever is going on, though, I would recommend extreme skepticism because two people are involved whose word you would be very foolish to trust on any scientific matter…
oracknows | August 20, 2014
I’ll partially apologize here. The reason is that I said I’d be back to business dishing out the Insolence as usual, be it in the form of my usual 2,000 word gems, or slightly shorter, or a lot longer. However, fate intervened. First, there were new developments in the Frank Arguello threat machine. Go back to this post for updates. More importantly, a really cool thing finally happened. Steve Novella and a person regular readers of this blog know and love managed to do something that we need to do more of: Get the viewpoint of science-based medicine published in high impact biomedical…
oracknows | August 20, 2014As I happened to be out last night at a function for my department, I didn’t have the time necessary to lay out a 2,000 word bit of Insolence. I did, however, have time to note that yet another practitioner unhappy with being criticized over his scientifically questionable treatment, in this case, Dr. Frank Arguello, has expressed grave, grave unhappiness with science-based criticism over his atavistic chemotherapy, so much so that he’s threatening to sue over it even though he really has no case. In fact, this guy is a bit more—shall we say?—over the top than the average subject of criticism…
oracknows | August 18, 2014
About five weeks ago a month ago, I finally wrote the post I had been promising to write for months before about medical marijuana. At the time, I also promised that there would be follow-up posts. Like Dug the Dog seeing a squirrel, I kept running into other topics that kept me from revisiting the topic. However, recently the New York Times gave me just the little nudge I needed to come back and revisit the topic, first by openly advocating the legalization of marijuana, then by vastly overstating the potential medical benefits of pot (compare the NYT coverage with my post from last month…
oracknows | August 15, 2014
A lot of medical specialties have throwaway newspapers/magazines that are supported by advertising and somehow mysteriously managed to show up for free in the mailboxes of their practitioners. In my case, I’ve found myself on the subscription list for such papers about oncology, but, given that I trained as a general surgeon. I’m Board-certified as a general surgeon. When I have to recertify in about three years, it will be as a general surgeon, which was really fun to try to do last time after having specialized as a breast cancer surgeon and will likely be even more fun next time, when I…
oracknows | August 12, 2014
I come across antivaccine editorials all the time. Usually, some editor ignorant of the issues involved is duped by antivaccine arguments or succumbs to the annoying journalistic fallacy (with respect to science) of “telling both sides.” Either that, or the editor has antivaccine proclivities himself. Either way, the result is an op-ed by someone like Barbara Loe Fisher, one of the clown car crew over at at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, or one of the drinking moms over at the horribly misnamed “The Thinking Moms’ Revolution.” I’ve seen so many of them and dealt with the same…
oracknows | August 11, 2014
Over the last decade that I’ve been at this blogging thing, I’ve come across some incredibly irresponsible quackery, but what I saw about a week and a half ago took the cake. I’m referring to practitioners of The One Quackery To Rule Them All, homeopathy, demonstrating a sense delusion that was as massive as the concentration of a 30C homeopathic dilution is small when they proposed that homeopathy could be used ot treat Ebola virus disease. There are not enough facepalms face palmy enough to express the disgust at the utter ridiculousness and irresponsibility of even suggesting that magic…
oracknows | August 10, 2014
One of the most annoying phenomena when it comes to “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), which its advocates are more and more insistent on calling “integrative medicine” is how little the average doctor cares that pseudoscience is infiltrating medicine. The reason, of course, is that CAM advocates don’t like the “alternative” part of the term CAM. Come to think of it, they don’t like the “complementary” part, either, because it implies that conventional science-based medicine (what I like to refer to as “real” medicine) is the main treatment and what they do is just “…