complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | April 1, 2014Of all the cranks, quacks, antivaccinationists, and pseudoscientists that I've encountered (and applied a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence to) over the years, there are a few who belong in the top tier—or, if you prefer, the bottom tier. They stick out in my memory for a variety of reasons, either through their sheer crankitude on a variety of subjects (such as Mike Adams), sheer persistence on one subject (such as Jake Crosby or any of the denizens of the antivaccine crank blogs Age of Autism or The Thinking Moms' Revolution), or fame for promoting quackery (Joe Mercola). One of these…
oracknows | March 31, 2014As hard as it is to believe, I've actually "known" pediatrician to the antivaccine stars (such as Jenny McCarthy), "Dr. Jay" Gordon, for nearly nine years now. It began back in 2005 when I first noticed him writing blogs full of antivaccine nonsense at the then-new group blog, The Huffington Post, where I noted antivaccine rhetoric running rampant, complete with amazing examples of what I like to call the "pharma shill" gambit. Since then, he's periodically come to my attention, be it for nonsense equating vaccine manufacturers to tobacco companies, falling headlong for the bogus "toxins"…
oracknows | March 28, 2014Dr. Robert Sears has to be one of the most irresponsible pediatricians on the face of the earth, if not the most irresponsible. Many of you might recall that a little more than a week ago "Dr. Bob" posted a borderline unhinged rant on Facebook aimed at his own patients, who, quite reasonably, were calling him about the measles outbreak going on in southern California right now and asking him about the measles vaccine. It was entitled Measles Epidemic . . . NOT!, and his response boiled down to, in essence, "get the vaccine if you're worried, but there's no real reason to worry." He also…
oracknows | March 27, 2014Note: I was busy doing something last night that left me no time to compose any fresh Insolence, which will become apparent by this weekend. In the meantime, however, I'm betting quite a few of you haven't seen this before, and those who have might want to discuss it further in a different environment.
Quackademic medicine.
I love that term, because it succinctly describes the infiltration of pseudoscientific medicine into medical academia. As I've said many times, I wish I had been the one to coin the phrase, but I wasn't. To the best of my ability to determine, I first picked it up from Dr…
oracknows | March 25, 2014After the last couple of days of depressing posts about the utter failure of the FDA to do its job protecting cancer patients from the likes of Stanislaw burzynski, it's time to move on. Unfortunately, the first thing that caught my eye as I sat down to blog last night not only fried my irony meter as though a radioactive flame had been aimed at it by Godzilla itself but it also stomped that sucker flat as though Godzilla had jumped up and down on it. It came from one of the only places where the bloggers are so utterly without a sense of self-awareness that they could achieve such a feat. No…
oracknows | March 24, 2014After the last couple of days of depressing posts about the utter failure of the FDA to do its job protecting cancer patients from the likes of Stanislaw burzynski, it's time to move on. Given how utterly demoralizing it was to see the FDA, in essence, pass the buck when it comes to protecting cancer patients, I thought back to more amusing times. Oddly enough, some of these times involved Burzynski. Specifically, they involved Burzynski's propagandist Eric Merola, whose spittle-flecked rants never fail to amuse.
For example, a frequent charge made by Burzynski fans like Merola is that we "…
oracknows | March 21, 2014
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."
I know I've used that quote before several times over the 9+ years that I've been blogging. These days, I probably use it most frequently when it comes to the topic of Stanislaw Burzynski. Every time I think that I can give the topic a rest for a while (and, believe me, I do want to give it a rest), something invariably seems to happen to pull me back in. So it was yesterday when i was made aware of a new development so disappointing that I'm still wiping the dirt off my chin from my jaw dropping to the floor. Even more amazing is that…
oracknows | March 20, 2014If there's one thing a budding skeptic quickly learns is that at the core of any good woo almost invariably lurks at least one conspiracy theory. At the risk of flirting a little too close to Godwin territory, this simple fact about pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and other non-evidence-based belief systems was first driven home to me around 15 years ago when I first started becoming interested in Holocaust denial. It didn't take too long for me to discover that at the heart of Holocaust denial are various conspiracy theories. Somehow the Jews, we are told, conspired to exaggerate the number of…
oracknows | March 18, 2014As hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when I (sort of) gave "Dr. Bob" Sears the benefit of the doubt. You remember Dr. Bob, don't you? Son of the famous pediatrician Dr. William Sears, who was best known for his "Sears Parenting Library" and is a not infrequent guest on TV, where he goes by the name of "Dr. Bill." Like his father, Bob Sears, likes to do the "Dr. First Name" thing and calls himself "Dr. Bob." (What is it with pediatricians and this annoying affectation?)
Along with his wife Martha Sears, RN, Dr. Bill is known as a major proponent of "attachment parenting."…
oracknows | March 18, 2014Although I don't want to distract (too much) from an interview I'm flogging today, I can't help but take note of an lovely development in the world of quackery. Everybody's favorite quackery promoter and financial scammer Kevin Trudeau has been sentenced to ten years in prison for his scams:
Best-selling author Kevin Trudeau, whose name became synonymous with late-night TV pitches, was sentenced to 10 years in prison Monday for bilking consumers through ubiquitous infomercials for his book, "The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You to Know About."
As he imposed the sentence prosecutors had…
oracknows | March 16, 2014I'm sure that a lot of you, like me, are watching the rebooted version of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, with Neil deGrasse Tyson taking over the hosting duties originally handled so ably over 30 years ago by Carl Sagan. I definitely enjoyed the first episode and am looking forward to additional episodes. The only thing that annoys me is that Cosmos is on at the same time as The Walking Dead, but that's what DVRs were made for. The first episode, which is all I've seen thus far at this writing, was quite impressive, and the segment at the end in which Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about the time he…
oracknows | March 15, 2014Amidst all the sturm und drang after a recent post, I was reminded elsewhere on the blog why I do what I do. So I'm going to do more of it today.
You might recall Liza Cozad, wife of David Lauser, who is the drummer in Sammy Hagar's band. She has an inoperable brain tumor and wants to try Stanislaw Burzynski's antineoplastons. However, because of the partial clinical hold on his clinical trials, she can't get them. Unfortunately, now she and her husband have been using their names to lobby Congress to pressure the FDA to allow an exemption. I wrote a post about this around a month ago. The…
oracknows | March 14, 2014Time to get back to business after yesterday's festivities.
One of the items of Gospel Truth among the "autism biomed" movement, which consists of people who fervently believe that autism is caused by some sort of external "toxin," infection, or vaccines and that subjecting children to various forms of quackery designed either to "detoxify" or reverse whatever physiological derangement believed to be at the root of autism will "recover" these children from autism. Of course, there are a lot of antivaccine believers in the autism biomed movement, and arguably the vast majority of "autism…
oracknows | March 12, 2014I realize that some of my readers will chide me for saying this, but I usually expect better of Reason. Although I sometimes have a tendency to be a bit—shall we say?—Insolent about libertarians when they pass from a reasonable defense of civil liberties into an Ayn Rand-inspired fantasy world in which the market cures all, useless people keep the supermen (and women) down, and the government is virtually unnecessary, I've usually considered Reason.com to represent a fairly—if you'll excuse the word—reasonable variety of libertarianism. For instance, Ronald Bailey actually once presented…
oracknows | March 10, 2014I forgot if I ever mentioned that I have an article out in the current episode of Skeptical Inquirer about Stanislaw Burzynski. I call it a "primer for skeptics," because that's what it is. So, if you subscribe to SI (Skeptical Inquirer, not Sports Illustrated), read. If not, get thee to a newsstand before it's gone. Thus endeth the plug and beginneth the Insolence.
When last I discussed Stanislaw Burzynski, I noted that, among other things, the state of Texas appears far more interested in putting abortion providers out of business than it does in protecting its citizens suffering from…
oracknows | March 10, 2014Every so often I wonder what the status is regarding the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine. It's something I've been writing about on a regular basis for nine years now, a phenomenon known as "quackademic medicine." It's simultaneously a depressing and energizing topic, energizing because it's something I'm passionate about, but depressing because at times it seems like an unwinnable battle.
Times like now.
What depressed me this time was article that popped up in my feed on Medscape entitled, Do Clinicians Base CAM Recommendations to Patients on Evidence of Efficacy? Since "…
oracknows | March 7, 2014Oh, dear.
I didn't think I'd be writing about that wretched hive of Dunning-Kruger scum and quackery, the most inaptly named website and blog of all time, The Thinking Moms' Revolution (TMR), after having written about it just earlier this week. When last we visited this klatsch of smugly arrogant moms, one of them was bragging about how, if your pediatrician "fires" you because you won't do the responsible thing and vaccinate your children, you should be proud because it means that you've arrived as a "Thinker." And, yes, they do capitalize the word "Thinker" and its variants, such as "…
oracknows | March 5, 2014I don't know if I could be a pediatrician right now.
True, I probably don't have the personality to be a pediatrician, at least not a primary care pediatrician on the front lines. After all, if I did, I probably wouldn't have become a surgeon, much less a hyperspecialized cancer surgeon. One reason (among many, of course) is that I don't have the patience to deal with non-vaccinating parents, particularly parents with massive cases of Dunning-Kruger disease. The same goes for being a pediatric nurse practitioner or nurse, who are also on the front lines in dealing with the antivaccine…
oracknows | March 4, 2014I've mentioned before how Detroit is my hometown. What that means is that I live very near to Canada. In fact, I can go into Windsor pretty much any time I want to, although I don't do it very often. Lots of Canadians work at the cancer center I work at because it's only a few miles from the tunnel to Windsor. That's why I was so disturbed when Ontario proposed letting naturopaths have prescribing privileges. Ultimately, the bill was passed, allowing naturopaths to prescribe actual prescription drugs, although it took three years to hammer out regulations based on the law. Of course,…
oracknows | March 3, 2014
Last week, one of my favorite comedians and filmmakers of all time passed away unexpectedly. I'm referring, of course, to Harold Ramis, whose work ranged from movies like National Lampoon's Animal House (the first R-rated movie I ever saw, actually), to gems like Ghostbusters and and Groundhog Day. In fact, in retrospect, when I posted about Brian Hooker and the antivaccine movement trying to resurrect the hoary corpse of the conspiracy theory that the CDC is some how "covering up" data that would prove that the antivaccine cranks were right all along about mercury in vaccines as a cause…