complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | July 4, 2014Happy 4th of July!
I'm taking the day off, largely to indulge my patriotic duty to laugh at things like Dinesh D'Souza's new movie (something all patriotic red-blooded Americans should be doing), but more importantly to work on a manuscript and especially to get ready for The Amazing Meeting. If you're going to be there, sound off! Maybe we can touch bases and hang at the Del Mar. In the meantime, I'd like to thank my friends at Michigan Skeptics for sending around this lovely little magazine cover. We need a real magazine like this, don't you think?
My only complaint is that Dr. Oz only…
oracknows | July 3, 2014This is a post about homeopathic quackery. But I repeat myself.
Those of you who’ve been readers here for a while have no doubt encountered Dana Ullman. He’s been popping up from time to time as a topic of this blog for many years now, almost to the very beginning, when he began spewing the most unbelievably silly and pseudoscientific defenses of homeopathy. Darwin had his bulldog in the form of a man named Thomas Huxley. Unfortunately, Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, has his very own pit bull 200 years later in the form of Dana Ullman. That is not a compliment, nor is it meant…
oracknows | July 3, 2014Our regularly scheduled post will go live later this morning. In the meantime, this is a public service announcement...with GUITAR! (Oh, wait.)
As you recall, last week, the FDA inexplicably decided to lift the partial clinical hold on Stanislaw Burzynski's bogus clinical trials of antineoplastons, which he's used since the 1990s as a pretext to charge huge sums of money for "case management fees" to patients for a treatment whose efficacy he has never demonstrated. Yesterday, the Center for Inquiry laid in, and has sent a letter to legislators:
“We are frankly stunned to hear that the…
oracknows | July 1, 2014There is no doubt in my mind that Robert O. Young is among the worst cancer quacks I have ever encountered. I’ve never been able to figure out how he manages to continue to practice after over 20 years, given the egregiousness of his quackery. Indeed, I was overjoyed when I learned back in January when finally—finally!—I got to see Young in a prison jumpsuit being hauled before a judge after having been arrested and charged with 18 felony counts of grand theft and practicing medicine without a license, as well as administering intravenous treatments in an unlicensed facility.
As I noted at…
oracknows | June 30, 2014One of the most depressing things I regularly write about is, of course, the antivaccine movement. However, nearly as depressing to me is to watch the steady march of what I view as medical pseudoscience or even outright quackery into what should be bastions of science-based medicine, namely academic medical centers. As I’ve discussed many times before, it’s gotten to the point where a medical school, in order to remain accredited, has to teach a certain amount of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), or, as it’s increasingly called, “integrative medicine” (or, as I like…
oracknows | June 27, 2014Yesterday’s post was just too depressing to contemplate and even more depressing to write. It was a total downer after seen the awesomeness that was John Oliver gloriously skewering America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz. That’s why I think it would be good to finish this week on an amusing note. Well, it would be amusing if it weren’t for my knowledge that the woman who wrote the post I’m about to “analyze” has an autistic child and is subjecting that child to quackery. Actually, that’s true of pretty much every woman who blogs at the wretched hive of scum and autism biomed quackery where this post…
oracknows | June 23, 2014After Dr. Oz's very bad week last week, it's wonderful to see John Oliver take on Dr. Oz in a very long segment on his show Last Week Tonight With John Oliver:
Hilarious.
oracknows | June 20, 2014
It's been three days since America's quack, Dr. Mehmet Oz, had his posterior handed to him by a wily old prosecutor who is now a Senator, Claire McCaskill. The beauty of it is that, not only was Dr. Oz called, in essence, a liar to his face and not only was he called out for his irresponsible and hypercaffeinated promotion of various diet scams on his show, which is seen by millions every day, but he didn't see it coming, and his public spanking as he testified in front of Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance, chaired by Sen. McCaskill, made instant news, with…
oracknows | June 18, 2014One of the benefits of blogging is that it's broadened my horizons. Although the vast majority of what I write about happens in my very own country, the United States, nonetheless I frequently learn about things happening in many other countries, some that I wouldn't necessarily pay a lot of attention to. But when something happens in a country, not matter how far away, that interests me, sometimes it'll interest me enough to write about it. This is particularly true when it's a story about how other countries deal with the pseudoscientific bunch of quackery that comprise most of the…
oracknows | June 17, 2014I almost feel sorry for "America's Quack," Dr. Mehmet Oz. Well, not really.
Remember last week when I took note of an upcoming Senate hearing, specifically a hearing on weight loss scams in front of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance, which is chaired by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO). At the time, I wasn't pleased, because I assumed that the reason Dr. Oz had been invited to testify was in order to bring some star power to the proceedings and get some television coverage, given that the rest of the witnesses consisted of representatives from government…
oracknows | June 16, 2014It was just over a year ago that I had my last bit to say about a man who can arguably called the antivaccine activist who gave Orac his start. I'm referring, of course, to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Indeed, my first deconstruction of the nonsense about vaccines that Kennedy laid down in 2005 in an article foolishly and irresponsibly published in both Salon.com and Rolling Stone was what got Orac noticed, a mere six months or so after this blog had begun—exactly nine years ago, today, amazingly enough. (Holy crap, this blog is old...) Every so often, Kennedy has reappeared to spread fear,…
oracknows | June 15, 2014Deepak Chopra isn't very happy right now. In fact, he appears downright pissed off right now, particularly at skeptics, so much so that he's issued a hilariously fatuous "challenge" to James Randi (a.k.a.) The Amazing Randi on You Tube entitled Deepak Chopra's One Million Dollar Challenge to Skeptics:
Yes, apparently with The Amazing Meeting (a.k.a. TAM) less than four weeks away, Chopra is looking to stir the pot a little bit with his usual blend of Choprawoo about consciousness and mind-body dualism and how nasty skeptics can't accept the paranormal and the healing powre of "intent." It's…
oracknows | June 13, 2014
Over the last two days, both Mark Crislip and Jann Bellamy wrote great pieces over at Science-Based Medicine about reiki. In particular, Jann Bellamy discussed reiki starting with an example that I've been citing in my talks about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia for at least four or five years now: The Cleveland Clinic Foundation and its website, which describes reiki thusly:
Reiki is a form of hands-on, natural healing that uses universal life force energy. The term comes from the Japanese words “rei,” which translates into universal, and “ki,” which means…
oracknows | June 11, 2014With very few exceptions, antivaccinationists labor under the delusion that they are not antivaccine. The reason is simple. Deep down, at some level, even the most dedicated antivaccine advocate knows that society quite rightly views it as a bad thing to be against a preventative intervention that has arguably saved more lives than any other medical intervention. Of course, as I've documented many times in the past, there are some who are openly antivaccine and proud of it, but they seem to be the minority. Most antivaccinationists, like Jenny McCarthy, hide behind a mantra resembling, "I'm…
oracknows | June 10, 2014I've never made it much of a secret that I don't much like "America's doctor," Dr. Mehmet Oz. Just enter his name into the search box of this blog, and you'll find quite a few posts in which I deconstruct some bit of quackery that Dr. Oz has promoted on his show, be it his promotion of faith healing and even psychic medium quackery from the likes of John Edward and Theresa Caputo (a.k.a. the Long Island Medium, who was—surprise! surprise!—recently reported to be a fraud); his fear mongering over the non-existent link between cell phone radiation and cancer; regular promotional visits by über-…
oracknows | June 10, 2014
As if yesterday's post weren't depressing enough, last weekend I attended the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago, which is part of the reason I didn't produce much in the way of posts about a week ago. Last Sunday, while aimlessly wandering from session to session and checking Twitter and e-mail between sessions, I noticed that a lot of people, including the official ASCO Twitter feed @ASCO, were Tweeting and re-Tweeting a link to this official story from ASCO, "Integrative Oncology Can Add Benefit to Traditional Cancer Treatments." It was…
oracknows | June 9, 2014Here we go again.
Two months ago, I noted that Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Polish expatriate physician who started out as a legitimate medical researcher and then in the late 1970s took a turn away from science-based medicine and towards being a "brave maverick doctor" through his discovery in blood and urine of substances he called antineoplastons with—or so Burzynski claims—major anticancer activity, had finally published the results of one of his clinical trials. Actually, he published the results of 42.5% of one of his clinical trials, given that he had, without adequate explanation,…
oracknows | June 6, 2014The other day, I expressed my disappointment at how Samantha Bee of The Daily Show got the politics of antivaccinationism wrong in a segment that was funny, but promoted the stereotype of antivaccine activists as being mainly crunchy lefties. In that post, I mentioned how the Texas Republican Party had a plank in its platform for "vaccine choice" in 2012. Now, thanks to PZ Myers, I notice that the plank appears to be there still for 2014:
All adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves, or their minor children, without…
oracknows | June 6, 2014I've discussed the evolution of "integrative" medicine on many occasions. To make the long story discussed over many posts short, medicine based on prescientific and/or unscientific ideas was once, appropriately, referred to as quackery, and those practicing it, appropriately, as quacks or charlatans—or other derogatory terms. Then, beginning sometime around the 1960s and 1970s, such quackery became known as "alternative" medicine. This was a less derogatory term than what used to be used, but still unsavory. As I put it, alternative medicine was (and is) medicine that does not fit into the…
oracknows | June 5, 2014Quacks really hate Wikipedia.
It's understandable, really. Wikipedia has some fairly tight standards regulating its form and content. Quacks, thinking that because anybody can edit Wikipedia articles it must mean that they can edit the entries on their favorite bit of woo to their hearts' content in order to make it look more scientifically supported and to remove disconfirming information, are disappointed when they discover that it's not that easy. Now, I've been a critic of Wikipedia in the past, having found problems in entries on topics where I have deep knowledge and been concerned that…