complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | July 24, 2013This is a post that is about Stanislaw Burzynski but not about Stanislaw Burzynski. Obviously, regular readers are more than aware who Stanislaw Burzynski is, but even though I just blogged about him a few days ago, I still feel obligated to recount briefly who he is, for the benefit of readers who might have arrived here through Google searches or other means. Stanislaw Burzynski is a famous "cancer doctor" (I use scare quotes because he is not an oncologist and has no clinical training in medical oncology yet practices as a medical oncologist) who discovered something he called "…
oracknows | July 24, 2013It's hard to believe that it's been nearly two years since I first noticed that a board certification in quackery was in the works and appeared to be nearly ready to go. I'm referring, of course, to Andrew Weil's effort to create a board certification in so-called "integrative medicine," better known to those of us on the science-based side of medicine as integrating quackery and pseudoscience with real medicine. Since it's been so long since I last addressed this issue, it's probably worth a brief recap. Basically, back in 2011, Andrew Weil and his Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine (…
oracknows | July 22, 2013Mike Adams (a.k.a. the "Health Ranger") has been a regular blog topic for several years now. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that, among supporters of quackery, no one quite brings the crazy home the way Mike Adams does, be it writing antivaccine rap songs, abusing dead celebrities by claiming they would have survived if only they had used whatever quackery Adams supported at the time or painting them as victims of big pharma, or conspiracy mongering on a level that make Alex Jones blush. Truly, Mikey has a special talent among woo-meisters. Joe Mercola might have…
oracknows | July 22, 2013Time really does fly. It's hard to believe that it's been over a week since I gave my big (to me, at least) talk at TAM. It's equally hard to believe that it's been more than a week since I had the honor of being kicked out of Penn Jillette's Private Rock & Roll Bacon & Doughnut Party because back in February I had had the temerity to question whether it was a good idea for Penn & Teller to appear on The Dr. Oz Show. It was a surreal experience, to be sure, to be cussed out publicly (albeit with no mention of my name), kicked out of Penn's private party, and then to have had Penn…
oracknows | July 19, 2013I promised myself that I was done writing about Jenny McCarthy this week. Two posts, a lengthy one and a brief one, lamenting her being hired for a national daytime talk show was, in my view, enough. Unfortunately, something's happened that makes me want to make like Arnold Schwarzenegger in that famous scene from the 1980s action flick Commando, in which he had promised one villain that he would kill him last. Later in the film while holding this same villain over a cliff, Arnold says, "Remember when I promised I would kill you last? I lied."
Except that I wasn't lying at the time. I really…
oracknows | July 18, 2013I've often (perhaps too often) referred to homeopathy as The One Quackery To Rule Them All. If not homeopathy, what other quackery would rule? Homeopathy is, after all, the perfect quackery. Most of its most "potent" remedies are nothing more than water, because homeopaths believe that the more a solution is serially diluted (with succussion, or vigorous shaking, between each serial dilution), the more potent it becomes, and frequently dilute their solutions far beyond the point where it is likely that there is even one molecule of the original substance in the resulting homeopathic dilution…
oracknows | July 17, 2013Sometimes, the mainstream press gets it (mostly) right, and Jake Tapper actually got it right in a report on CNN yesterday about Jenny McCarthy's having been hired by ABC as a regular on The View. Although I don't like how Jake Tapper describes Generation Rescue as an "autism organization" (it is clearly an antivaccine group), and he perhaps didn't rebut Jenny's ludicrous claim that she is "not antivaccine" but rather "pro-safe vaccine" (seriously, he showed McCarthy's 2008 antivaccine protest in Washington and didn't even pick the most inflammatory signs as a counterpoint to McCarthy's…
oracknows | July 15, 2013Sometimes, as I sit down to write a blog post, I have no idea what I'm going to write about at first. Fortunately, it's rare that I truly have zero idea what I'm going to write about. Usually, there are options, and I don't know which one I'm going to pick. Sometimes, however, something happens that demands that I write about it. Either that, or it's something that I know my readers will want me to write about and will be disappointed if I do not. Unfortunately, in this case, the timing is such that there's been nearly a full day since the announcement of this particularly stupid decision (…
oracknows | July 12, 2013Greetings, everyone. I realize that I, your host—is that anything like, "I, Tim Bolen"?—have been remiss in not providing the expected daily 2,000 word magnum opus. However, I have been busy plotting with our Lord and Master, Lord Draconis Zeneca. Our plans for world domination and the utter destruction of all "natural" cures are percolating nicely, and I shall be back to begin implementing them next week. In the mean time, the best way to hide our nefarious plans is in plain site; so let's have an open thread here to continue to plot!
oracknows | July 11, 2013Well, I'm here at TAM. I had a great time last night meeting up with old friends, although, thanks to the time difference between Eastern time and Las Vegas, combined with my having to give a talk today, I was forced to retire at an early 11 AM (which, of course, felt to me like 2 AM).
As you might imagine, blogging will be light, because I still have to put the finishing touches on my talk for Saturday and take in all the skeptic-y goodness at TAM, but I can't resist this little tidbit. It's a video I came across the other day that brings a whole new meaning to the term "chiroquacktic."…
oracknows | July 10, 2013Like Steve, I'm off to The Amazing Meeting today. I don't know how much I'll be posting, but, as Han Solo so famously said, "Hey, it's me." I'm sure I won't be able to resist. In any case, I'll be taking part in the Science-Based Medicine workshop tomorrow, and, for the first time ever, I'll be giving a talk on the main stage on Saturday, as half of a tag team with Bob Blaskiewicz slicing and dicing our favorite cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski. That will be followed by a panel on—what else?—science-based medicine and how to take on the cranks, quacks, and dubious in medicine.
In any case,…
oracknows | July 8, 2013I don't know why I'm interested in this, to the point where I'm on my sixth post about it since February. I sometimes even ask myself that very question, because taking an admittedly somewhat perverse interest in the internecine feuds among antivaccinationists. Maybe it's a bit of schadenfreude. Maybe it's just me. Whatever the reason, the ongoing feud between Jake "Boy Wonder" Crosby and his former mentors and allies in the antivaccine movement keeps bringing me back for more, as it did last week after a couple of months away. Maybe it's because when the antivaccine movement is fighting…
oracknows | July 7, 2013Since I've been on a bit of a roll with respect to acupuncture over the last week or so, I thought I'd just round out the trilogy with one more post. One myth that acupuncture apologists like to promote relentlessly is that acupuncture is completely harmless, that it almost never causes complications or problems. While it's true that acupuncture is relatively safe, it still involves sticking needles into the skin, and, given that, it would be delusional to think that there couldn't be injury caused by that. Rarely, however, have I seen a story like this from Canada reported in the National…
oracknows | July 3, 2013Here we go again.
Oh, well. These things come in waves, and sometimes I have theme weeks. Right now, this week appears to be developing into a week of quackademic medicine involving dubious acupuncture studies. Yesterday, it was acupuncture for lymphedema after breast cancer surgery, a study coming right about what is rapidly becoming the Barad-dûr of cancer quackademia, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. How a hospital that is so awesome in every other way can have such a blind spot bigger than the Eye of Sauron, I don't know, but it does, and the result is a steady stream of…
oracknows | July 2, 2013Lymphedema is a complication of breast cancer surgery that all surgeons who do breast surgery detest. Patients, of course, detest it even more. The limb swelling that is the primary symptom of lymphedema comes about because surgery on the axillary lymph nodes (the lymph nodes under the arm) that is part and parcel of surgery for breast cancer can interrupt lymph vessels and cause backup of lymph fluid in the affected arm. This backup has consequences, including skin changes, a tendency towards infections, and, in extreme cases, elephantiasis (which is, fortunately, rarely seen these days as a…
oracknows | June 30, 2013There's a general rule that whenever you see two enemies fighting with each other that you should generally just let them. Of course, some might argue, as Gandalf did about Saruman and Sauron, that the winner of the fight would emerge stronger and free of doubt, making him harder to conquer. Fortunately, I don't think this will be a problem in this case in the battle I'm about to discuss. There's also the saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but unfortunately I don't think that that saying applies here either. In this case, it's a question of which of the two combatants I consider…
oracknows | June 28, 2013A little more than a week ago, I took note of Dr. Paul Offit's new book, Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine and a story in which he was featured in USA Today about the nonsense that is alternative medicine. The news story coincided with the release of Paul Offit's book, which of course led me to express my admiration for not only Offit's ability to write good books about topics that interest me but to garner the publicity of a major story in a national newspaper published the same day his book was released. No wonder he drives the antivaccine lunatic…
oracknows | June 27, 2013Antivaccinationists endanger public health. They deny to high heaven that that is what they do, but they are deluding themselves. Their fear mongering about vaccines, in which vaccines in general or specific ingredients are portrayed as causing autism and a wide variety of chronic diseases, despite study after study failing to find even a whiff of a hint of a correlation between vaccines or vaccine ingredients and autism, have resulted in precipitous declines in vaccination rates in some areas and contributed to an increase in the distrust of vaccines by parents. In the US, although overall…
oracknows | June 25, 2013I write about cancer quackery a lot, and I've been at it for over a decade. I first cut my teeth on Usenet, delving into that cesspit of unreason known as misc.health. alternative, where my eyes were opened to just the sorts of pseudoscientific and unscientific cancer treatments patients are enticed into trying, sometimes in lieu of effective, science-based therapy. Sometimes, they're lucky enough to get away with it, such cases occurring most commonly when they have undergone effective primary surgery or other therapy for their cancer that eliminated it before the quackery was ever tried.…
oracknows | June 25, 2013Once again, real life, mainly the eternal search (i.e., groveling) for grant money to keep my lab going, interferes with unreal life. Three grant applications due the same week will do that. Hopefully this will be the last time for a while, at least until unreal life might interfere with unreal life in a couple of weeks at TAM.
In the meantime, it occurs to me. With the recent reacquaintance of skeptical bloggers with the amazing antivaccine crankery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (specifically, when he decided to use Holocaust analogies for vaccines and autism), I thought it might be fun to…