complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | November 19, 2012As I looked over the ol' blog last night, I was shocked to realize that I haven't blogged about the antivaccine movement and its offenses against science in nearly three weeks. That's right! The last time I did a vaccine post was when I examined a particularly egregiously bad paper from a couple of scientists who have drunk deeply of the antivaccine Kool Aid and as a result are trying to blame the HPV vaccine Gardasil for the death of an 18-year-old woman in Australia and a 14-year-old girl in Quebec. It's amazing but true. Rarely do I go that long without antivaccine pseudoscience attracting…
oracknows | November 18, 2012One of the great benefits of having been a blogger for nearly eight years now is that I now have a rich history of thousands of posts. True, there are the occasional posts that I wish I hadn't written and even the occasional post that I consider to be not particularly good, but for the most part I'm proud of my work and would put my blog posts up against nearly anyone else's. Another benefit of having such a long history is that, from time to time, I get the opportunity to revisit really old posts. Having written about these issues for so long, I find it really gratifying when I can revisit a…
oracknows | November 15, 2012One characteristic of cranks, quacks, and pseudoscience boosters is a love-hate relationship with science. They desperately crave the respectability and validation that science confers. In the case of medicine, they want to be seen as evidence- and science-based. On the other hand, they hate science because it just won't given them what they want: Confirmation and validation. The reasons, of course, are obvious; their preferred ideas about disease and modalities to treat it are not rooted in science. Rather, they're usually based in either prescientific concepts of how the human body works…
oracknows | November 14, 2012It wasn't so long ago (less than a week, actually), that I noticed what I referred to as a paean to the quackery known as naturopathy. It appeared—where else?—on that wretched hive of scum and quackery known at The Huffington Post. It was even entitled My Love Affair with Naturopathy. Not unexpectedly, this very article revealed just what quacks naturopaths are, as it told the story of a woman with vague symptoms, "messed up menstrual cycles," and other complaints who went to a naturopath and was blown away by the "personalized" attention and even more happy that this particular naturopath…
oracknows | November 13, 2012Regular readers probably know that I'm into more than just science, skepticism, and promoting science-based medicine (SBM). (If they're regular readers of my other, not-so-super-secret other project, they might also realize that they've seen this post before elsewhere. I had to stay out late for a work-related event and decided to tart it up and recycle. So sue me.) I'm also into science fiction (hence the very name of this blog, not to mention the pseudonym I use), computers, and baseball, not to mention politics (at least more than average). That's why our recent election, coming as it did…
oracknows | November 12, 2012"Holistic."
How often do we hear that word bandied about by practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's increasingly called, "integrative medicine" (IM)? Lots. The reason is that CAM/IM practitioners seem to think they own the word. They've so utterly co-opted it that it has become meaningless, in the process perverting it. No longer does it mean "taking care of the whole person." Not really, at least not anymore. Thanks to quacks having taken possession of it as their own, "holistic" now has a connotation of woo, in which it is said to be impossible to be a…
oracknows | November 11, 2012I'm a scientist, but I'm also a surgeon, which means I've spent quite a bit of time in operating rooms. In the OR, teamwork is critical, and each member of the team should be using science- and evidence-based medicine to inform their judgment regarding what to do. If there's one kind of practitioner in the OR that relies heavily on SBM, it should be the anesthesiologist. Surgery is a combination of science and technical skill, and sometimes deciding what to do in the operating room is more a matter of judgment based on experience than science. For instance, if I encounter bleeding, what I do…
oracknows | November 10, 2012As our great Lord Draconis Zeneca promises, besides the fantasies of filthy lucre in the minds of our opponents, there are other rewards to being one of his shills and minions besides getting to blog to my heart's content about the pseudoscience and quackery that is "alternative" medicine. One of them is that sometimes I find out that my victim target subject notices me.
So it was, when I became aware on Facebook that Eric Merola noticed me. Merola, as you might recall, is the producer of that paean to Stanislaw Burzynski, entitled, unimaginatively and awkwardly enough, Burzynski the Movie -…
oracknows | November 9, 2012If you're a skeptic and supporter of science-based medicine (SBM), as I am, no doubt there are times when you ask yourself in exasperation, frustration, or curiosity just what the appeal of quackery is to so many people. Why do people fall for this stuff? you no doubt ask yourself at times. Certainly I do sometimes, and even though I know a lot about the cognitive shortcomings that we humans all share that lead to confirmation bias, confusing correlation with causation, mistaking placebo effects and regression to the mean for real therapeutic effects, and poor observational skills, sometimes…
oracknows | November 7, 2012I've been writing about Stanislaw Burzynski again, just yesterday having mentioned a warning letter that the Burzynski Clinic received from the FDA last month. Given Dr. Burzynski's history of promoting a highly dubious cancer therapy that he calls antineoplastons and administering them to patients under the guise of clinical trials for which he charges patients huge sums of money and of also selling an equally dubious form of "personalized gene targeted cancer therapy" that I've referred to as "personalized cancer therapy for dummies," I took a very dim view of his having received yet…
oracknows | November 6, 2012I sometimes think that Stanislaw Burzynski is a lot like the Bloody Mary of folklore, or perhaps Candyman of the famous horror movie—or perhaps like a number of other legends and horror stories—in that all it seems to take for him to show up in the blogosphere again is for me to recite his hame enough times. Yes, I know that it's a bit of confirmation bias on my part and whether or not some new Burzynski news happens to come to the fore again has little or nothing to do with my invocation of his name, but it is a rather amusing thought. Be that as it may, it was just late last week that I…
oracknows | November 5, 2012It's no secret that I have little but contempt for radical animal rights activists. I make no apologies for this and, quite frankly, consider my contempt for them well-justified based on their behavior and words. Be it their fetishization of violence against researchers who use animals, their threatening of students in order to frighten them away from careers in scientific research that might involve the use of animals (for example, Alena Rodriguez), intimidating researchers by declaring their children as "not off limits," trying to burn investigators' houses down, harassing researchers, and…
oracknows | November 4, 2012Chelation therapy, in my somewhat Insolent opinion, is pure quackery. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most common quackeries out there, used by a wide variety of practitioners for a wide variety of ailments blamed on "heavy metal toxicity." Chelation therapy involves using chemicals that can bind to the metal ions and allow them to be excreted by the kidneys is standard therapy for certain types of acute heavy metal poisoning, such as iron overload due to transfusion, aluminum overload due to hemodialysis, copper toxicity due to Wilson's disease, acute heavy metal toxicity, and a handful…
oracknows | November 2, 2012I hate to end the week on a down note, but sometimes it's necessary. It's been a while since I've written about Stanislaw Burzynski. I'm sure you recall Burzynski. He's a hero in the alternative medicine world, having been cast as a martyr to The Man (i.e., the FDA and Big Pharma) because of his selling of a dubious cancer cure that he calls antineoplastons. Although he's been selling his questionable cancer treatments for thirty years now, he's recently been in the news a lot lately thanks to a credulous paean to his activities in the form of a movie that was released in 2010 called,…
oracknows | October 31, 2012I'd like to publicly thank Dr. John Killen, Jr. I was looking for something to write about yesterday evening, and, just when I was beginning to despair that I might have to do another post on the lunacy that is antivaccine nonsense (even I get tired of taking on antivaccine idiocy, as regular readers know), he generously provided me with a perfect non-vaccine-related topic. Truly, to a skeptical blogger and supporter of science-based medicine like myself, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) blog is the gift that keeps on giving. I've written a lot of…
oracknows | October 30, 2012I guess this is in effect part two of yesterday's post. Regular daily readers (and you are a regular daily reader, aren't you?) will remember that yesterday I commented on the recent uptick in anti-Gardasil vaccine rhetoric coming from the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism and other sources, in the process deconstructing speculation masquerading as a case report allegedly indicting the quadrivalent HPV vaccine as a potential cause of premature ovarian failure in a 16 year old Australian girl. The article was so bad and so biased that I couldn't believe BMJ Case Reports published it in the…
oracknows | October 29, 2012Well, I'm home.
AFter spending a fun-filled three days in Nashville at CSICon communing with fellow skeptics and trying to awaken them to the problem of quackademic medicine, I made it back home. There were plenty of attendees who didn't make it back on time because flights to the East Coast were being cancelled left and right, courtesy of Hurricane Sandy. For example, Steve Novella and the entire SGU crew were forced to rent a van and drive 950 miles to Boston after their flight was cancelled sometime Saturday night. Difficulties aside, if there's one thing that almost always happens…
oracknows | October 29, 2012There's a saying in medicine that we frequently hear when a newer, more effective therapy supplants an older therapy or an existing therapy is shown not to be as efficacious as was once thought, and it has to do about how long it takes for the use of that therapy to decline. The saying basically says that the therapy won't die out until the current generation of established physicians retire and are replaced by the new generation coming up through medical schools. From my perspective, it's a bit of an exaggeration, because in the mere 13 years that I've been a real doctor (i.e., an attending…
oracknows | October 25, 2012Well, I'm here. That's right. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm at CSICon. As is the case when I'm at conferences, be they skeptical conferences or professional conferences, it's hard to predict the blogging time available. It could be a lot; it could be a little. Or it could be none. (Well, obviously it's not none, or you wouldn't be reading this.) In any case, there was lots of stuff going on, plus there was the second game of the World Series, which made me miss the live recording of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Oh, well. Steve understood. So I wasn't up for any heavy lifting or taking…
oracknows | October 25, 2012Instead of the usual logorrheic (usually) well-thought out Insolence you've come to expect every day, Instead, you'll hvae an announcement and a couple of random thoughts. The reasons are multiple. First, today's a travel day. I'm heading off to Nashville to attend and speak at CSICon. My topic? What do you think it will be? Why, quackademic medicine, of course! (What else would it be?) Not only will I get to share the stage with old friends and blogging collaborators, but with Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education! Yes, as part of the overall discussion of the problem of…