complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | April 15, 2013It's been a while since I've done this, but somehow now seems to be the right time, particularly after doing such a long post yesterday on the intellectually dishonest promotion of "brave maverick" cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski. Unfortunately, dubious clinics like the Burzynski Clinic are not the only place where I find highly questionable medicine. Sadly, as I've discussed many times, there is a phenomenon known as "quackademic medicine," in which quackery is administered and studied in actual academic medical centers. Indeed, it's hard for me to believe that it was nearly years ago that…
oracknows | April 14, 2013About a month ago, Eric Merola screened his second movie about "brave maverick doctor" Stanislaw Burzynski, Burzynski: Cancer Is A Serious Business, Part 2 (henceforth referred to as "Burzynski II"), a screening that Brian Thompson and an unnamed colleague from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) attended, took notes, and even managed to ask a question. At the time, I took advantage of Brian's awesome commentary about his experience on the JREF Swift Blog, his copious notes, and my read on Eric Merola's trailers for the movie, what he said in the first movie, and his own promotional…
oracknows | April 11, 2013I suppose that while I'm on another roll writing about the antivaccine movement I should just embrace it. I was going to start this post out again with one of my periodic laments about how blogging about the antivaccine movement has taken over and crowded out other topics that I like to write about. I realize it's become one of my go-to cliche beginnings, to the point where I sometimes feel lazy when I use it. It is, however, an honest sentiment, and I hide nothing with respect to my opinion of the antivaccine movement and how it endangers public health through the promotion of pseudoscience…
oracknows | April 10, 2013I guess that the antivaccinationists didn't listen to me last time when I suggested that maybe—just maybe—using Holocaust analogies when discussing autism and vaccines is just a wee bit inappropriate, such an overblown analogy that it spreads far more heat than light. At least, Kent Heckenlively didn't, and, because his invocation of the Nazi card came in the context of dealing with an issue that I blogged about before, I couldn't resist commenting on it again.
But first, the gratuitous Nazi analogy, courtesy of that "nice guy" Kent Heckenlively, which comes near the end of his post:
When I…
oracknows | April 9, 2013If there's one thing that a certain subset of people who view themselves as reasonable and science-based don't like, it's harshness: Harshness in criticism, harshness in discussion, or—horror of horrors!—anything they view as "incivility." That's all well and good as far as it goes, but the problem is that sometimes there are things that demand a harsh response because they are just that bad. For instance, when the government spends $30 million on a clinical trial to test a wildly implausible treatment that is not without risks for no good scientific reason and no real reason other than that…
oracknows | April 9, 2013Last week, I noted a particularly loathsome trend (even for antivaccinationists) to invoke Holocaust analogies for what they view as the "vaccine-induced autism epidemic holocaust." Now, loathsome analogies are not uncommon among antivaccinationists, who routinely refer to their children as "damaged" or "toxic" and view them as somehow not their "real" children, but this time around, former reporter turned hack editor for the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism fantasized about dragging his former colleagues through the "evidence" for a vaccine Holocaust the same way that Allied troops…
oracknows | April 6, 2013It's very clear that many antivaccinationists hate autistic children. The language they use to describe them makes that very clear. Such children are "damaged" (by vaccines, of course); the parents' real children were "stolen" from them (by vaccines); they are "toxic" (from vaccines); the "light left their eyes" (due to vaccines). Autism is an "epidemic," a "tsunami," even a "holocaust," with "denial" of that "holocaust" being equivalent to Holocaust denial. All of this likens autism to a horror on par with these calamities, and paints vaccines as the instrument of annihilation of…
oracknows | April 5, 2013Over the years this blog's been in existence, I've fallen into a habit in which I tend to like to finish off the week taking on a bit of science (well, usually pseudoscience) that is either really out there, really funny, or in general not as heavy as, for example, writing about someone like Stanislaw Burzysnki. Indeed, for nearly two years, I even turned into a feature, Your Friday Dose of Woo. Eventually, I got a bit tired of being straitjacketed into having to find something kooky or wacky every Friday, and I let the feature lapse. That doesn't mean that I don't still deliver an occasional…
oracknows | April 3, 2013Every so often I come across a news story relevant to the subject matter usually encompassed by this blog that makes me shake my head in disbelief at the sheer stupidity. OK, every day, if you count the antivaccine movement and its attacks on papers like the one I wrote about Monday and yesterday. True, the constant barrage of pseudoscience, quackery, and generalized scientific ignorance that the antivaccine movement floods me with constantly threatens to drown out everything else, even from other areas of medicine. This one, however, caught my attention. It was about a joke done by two…
oracknows | April 2, 2013Last week, the Journal of Pediatrics published a study that did a pretty good job of demolishing a favorite antivaccine trope used to frighten parents. In fact, it's one of the most effective of antivaccine tropes, as evidenced by a large number of parents who are generally pro-vaccine expressing doubts when asked about this particular antivaccine slogan. I'm referring, of course, to the "too many too soon" slogan, in which antivaccinationists try to imply that the current vaccine schedule somehow "overwhelms" an infant's immune system and leads to autism by some unknown and undemonstrated…
oracknows | April 1, 2013I got a bit behind on my work yesterday, so I'll be brief. Yesterday, the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) announced its annual Pigasus Awards. Sadly, each and every year, there are far more "deserving" candidates than there are awards to give. However, this year marks something awesome, namely the first time the prize has been awarded to someone who has become such a major focus of this blog over the last year and a half. We're talking Stanislaw Burzynski, who's for the first time won an award that he actually richly deserves:
The Pigasus Award in the Scientist Category goes to…
oracknows | April 1, 2013There are some days when I know what my topic will be—what it must be. These are times in which the universe gives the very appearance of handing to me my topic for the day on the proverbial silver platter with a giant hand descending from the clouds, pointing at it, and saying, "Blog about this, you idiot!" Usually, it's because a study is released or something happens or a quack writes something that cries out for rebuttal. Whatever it is, it's big and it's unavoidable (for me, at least).
This is one of those days.
The reason it's one of those days is because just last Friday, as I was…
oracknows | March 31, 2013It's been less than a week since I wrote about Stanislaw Burzynski. In fact, as hard as it is to believe, I've been trying not to. Obviously, I'm failing, but what can I say? Things keep happening.
In particular, there's Eric Merola. You remember Eric Merola? He's the producer of a propaganda film extolling the virtues of Stanislaw Burzynski who decided that one movie was not enough. He needed to make another, in which skeptics are painted as the enemy, a shadowy cabal. Well, apparently he saw a certain video I posted last Friday, and he was displeased. Whether it was because the speaker…
oracknows | March 29, 2013Three weeks ago, a certain "friend" of mine gave a talk to the National Capital Area Skeptics at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA. The topic was one near and dear to my heart, namely quackademic medicine; so I couldn't resist posting a link to the video.
Amusingly, Jake Crosby makes an appearance in the Q&A. Hilarity ensues as he is totally pwned by speaker.
ADDENDUM (April 15, 2013): Oh, goody. After six weeks, Jake has apparently gotten around to responding. Funny how he denies that he called me a liar. That was, in our encounter after the talk, the reason why I said "…
oracknows | March 28, 2013"Common sense" is not so common. Actually, that's not exactly right. What I meant was that what most people think of as "common sense" has little or nothing to do with what science concludes. Evidence talks, "common sense" walks. I saw a fantastic example to illustrate this point on a certain blog that I've found nearly as useful as a target topic to blog about as the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism (AoA). I'm referring, of course, to The Thinking Moms' Revolution (TMR), an antivaccine crank blog almost as cranky as (and sometimes even more cranky than) AoA., and the post that drew my…
oracknows | March 27, 2013When I wrote about the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) trial last week, little did I suspect that I would be revisiting the topic again so soon. For those of you not familiar with TACT, it was a trial designed to test a favorite quack treatment for cardiovascular disease, chelation therapy. It is, as I have described many times in the past, an incredibly implausible therapy based on a hugely simplistic concept that because calcium accumulates in atherosclerotic lesions, then using chelation therapy could remove the calcium and reduce the lesions. Chelation therapy is a favorite…
oracknows | March 27, 2013It's been a while since I've written about Brian Berman. We first met him when he somehow managed to insinuate a "case report" of chronic low back pain into The New England Journal of Medicine in which he recommended acupuncture for this patient. Dr. Berman also happens to be a founder of quackademic medicine on par with Andrew Weil. True, he's not as famous to a lay audience as Weil is, but his influence on quackademic medicine over the last couple of decades has been enormous. It's not for nothing that David Freedman picked Berman as the main subject of his pro-"integrative medicine"…
oracknows | March 24, 2013There are many fallacies that undergird alternative medicine, which evolved into "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), and for which the preferred term among its advocates is now "integrative medicine," meant to imply the "best of both worlds." If I had to pick one fallacy that rules above all among proponents of CAM/IM, it would have to be either the naturalistic fallacy (i.e., that if it's natural—whatever that means—it must be better) or the fallacy of antiquity (i.e., that if it's really old, it must be better). Of course, the two fallacies are not unrelated. In the minds of CAM…
oracknows | March 21, 2013I don't always blog about stories or studies that interest me right away. Part of the reason is something I've learned over the last eight years of blogging, namely that, while it's great to be the firstest with the mostest, I'd rather be the blogger with the mostest than the firstest. I've learned this from occasionally painful experience, although I'd be lying if I didn't admit that in part this is a rationalization for the fact that I have a demanding day job that keeps me from jumping all over stories and studies of interest in the way that some bloggers can. There's also the simple fact…
oracknows | March 20, 2013Heidi Stevenson amuses me.
The reasons are legion. Be it the time when Heidi lectured scientists on anecdotal evidence (which she values far more highly than scientists, of course, declaring it the "basis of all knowledge"); launched a vile and nonsensical attack on Stephen Barrett; argued against prior plausibility with using a straw man argument so massive that if it were set on fire (which she did) it could be seen from space; or made an even more idiotic argument to try to "prove" that wi-fi signals and EMF cause autism, Heidi never fails to deliver the stupid in mass quantities of black…