complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | July 30, 2012Joe Mercola is antivaccine, through and through, and, unfortunately, his website is one of the largest repositories of antivaccine quackery on the Internet. While it's true that, unlike the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, Mercola doesn't limit his advocacy of quackery to just antivaccine quackery, he has recently teamed up with Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the Orwellian-named National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) and the grande dame of the antivaccine movement. Indeed, Mike Adams has got nothing on Joe Mercola when Joe decides he wants to go on an antivaccine tear, which he did…
oracknows | July 25, 2012Medical therapies should be based upon science. That is a recurrent theme, indeed, the major theme, of this blog. Based on that simple thesis, I've spent the last decade examining "unconventional" treatments and evaluating the scientific basis (or, much more usually, the lack of a scientific basis) for various treatments. Yes, I've looked at other issues, including general skeptical issues, the occasional political rant, Holocaust denial, and, of course the odd self-indulgent bit of twaddle that every blogger engages in every now and then, but I always come back to the question of the…
oracknows | July 24, 2012At least half the time, it seems that when I take on a relatively new topic with every intention of just doing one post about it I somehow end up doing more than one post. I don't know why that is. It just seems to happen. Sometimes, I find something related to but sufficiently different that interests me, sometimes seemingly quite at random. Sometimes someone responds to my post in such a way that I feel obliged to answer. Sometimes, readers make me aware of variations on a theme, so to speak, either in the comments or by e-mailing me links. That's what happened this time.
Yesterday I posted…
oracknows | July 23, 2012Many are the forms of quackery to which autistic children are subjected to. It's amazing just how many dubious and dangerous treatments (dubbed "biomedical treatments" or "autism biomed") parents will try in an effort to "recover" their children. Perhaps the most shocking of this quackery that I've recently covered is something called "miracle mineral solution" (MMS), which is in reality nothing more than a powerful bleach. Parents make their autistic children drink diluted MMS, bathe in it, and even take bleach as an enema. They try to claim that what they are using is no more powerful than…
oracknows | July 22, 2012After all the years that I've been writing about vaccines, the science behind vaccines, and how antivaccinationists twist that science to turn what are arguably the greatest medical achievement of medicine and have saved arguably more lives than any other medical intervention devised by human minds into toxic cesspits of horrific chemical corruption that cause autism and destroy children, I thought I had seen it all. And perhaps I have. Sadly, seldum does any new bit of pseudoscience or new fallacious argument trying to claim that vaccines are dangerous surprise me anymore. That didn't used…
oracknows | July 20, 2012A couple of weeks ago, I had a bit of fun with a rather clueless chiropractor by the name of J.C. Smith (JCS), who decided to take a swipe at an organization with which I'm associated, namely the Institute for Science in Medicine (ISM). It was such an inept attack, filled with misinformation, pseudoscience, and logical fallacies, that it was what I like to call a "teachable moment" when it comes to chiropractors and chiropractic. Even more amusingly, JCS promised at the end of his post lambasting ISM as a new "medical mafia" that he would be writing a followup post. I could hardly wait. The…
oracknows | July 18, 2012During this year's TAM, I had the distinct pleasure of accompanying Steve Novella and Michael Shermer to debate an antivaccinationist at FreedomFest, a conservative/libertarian confab that was going on in Las Vegas at the same time as TAM. That antivaccinationist turned out to be Dr. Julian Whitaker, a man who champions Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and is one of Suzanne Somer's doctors. There's no polite way to put this, Steve Novella wiped the floor with Dr. Whitaker, mercilessly pummeling him with facts, analysis, and logic to the point where even the audience appeared to be grumbling. Even…
oracknows | July 17, 2012Things are getting back to normal here at Casa Orac. it's always a come down after going to TAM and being able to mingle, argue, and party with people who share my skeptical world view. Yesterday was back to reality, though, at least as much as jet lag and sleep deprivation allowed. Fortunately, Monday is a lab day, and I don't have an scheduled patient care responsibilities, and now I'm pretty much back to normal. Even so, I can't do epics like yesterday's post every day even under the best circumstances; so today I'll take a look at a little wafer thin mint to cleanse the palate.
I've…
oracknows | July 15, 2012Like so many other skeptics, I just returned from TAM, which, despite all the conflict and drama surrounding it this year, actually turned out to be a highly enjoyable experience for myself and most people I talked to. As I've been doing the last few years, I joined up with Steve Novella and other proponents of science-based medicine to do a workshop about how difficult it is to find decent health information on the Internet, and how the "University of Google" all too frequently puts quackery on the same level as reliable sources of medical information because all that matters for most search…
oracknows | July 11, 2012Here we go again...
Yes, I'm off to The Amazing Meeting, a.k.a. TAM, where I'll commune with a bunch of fellow skeptics, help do a workshop on science-based medicine, and participate in a panel discussion of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine." Things have been so crazy the last couple of weeks that it turns out that I don't have my talk completely finished, which means I'll be doing what I frequently do for talks, scientific, skeptical, or otherwise: Putting the finishing touches on it during the flight there. Good thing it's a four hour flight.
To those of you who are going,…
oracknows | July 10, 2012About a week and a half ago, I took note of a rather unhinged rant by comedian Rob Schneider about vaccines in which he trotted out an antivaccine movement's greatest hits compendium of pseudoscience, misinformation, and logical fallacies, all in the service of opposing California Bill AB 2109. Antivaccine activists hate this piece of legislation in particular, the reason being that it would make it just a little more difficult for parents to obtain philosophical exemptions from school mandates. Right now in California, parents basically just have to sign a form, no questions asked, no other…
oracknows | July 8, 2012One major point I've tried to make over the last few years is that the so-called "individualization" or "personalization" of treatments claimed by practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) is not "individualization" at all, but rather a sham that appears superficially like individualization but in reality is not. I say that because the "individualization" promoted by CAM practitioners is not based on science and clinical trials. Another point I've been trying to make is that the true "individualization" of treatments will require science, and it will not be easy. In fact…
oracknows | July 6, 2012What would we do without the Internet?
It's become so necessary, so pervasive, so utterly all-enveloping that it's hard to imagine a world without it. Given how much it pervades everything these days, it's easy to forget that it wasn't that long ago that the Internet was primarily the domain of universities and large research groups. Indeed, the Internet hasn't really been widely and easily available to the average citizen for very long at all. Go back 20 years, and most people didn't have it. For example, Netscape Navigator, the popular browser that made the Internet accessible, wasn't…
oracknows | July 4, 2012It's rather odd that I'll be writing two posts in a row having to do with a chiropractor, given that chiropractic is at best an occasional topic on this blog. Certainly, I don't hesitate to take on chiropractic when the mood strikes me or, more importantly, when I come across some seriously burning stupid coming from a chiropractor, but other topics tend to dominate my blogging. Let's just put it this way. Two posts in a row on a cancer quack or about antivaccinationists would be nothing the least bit unusual here, but two posts in a row about chiropractors is.
As regular readers probably…
oracknows | July 2, 2012Every so often I come across a post by quacks or supporters of quackery that make me wish that we as skeptics and supporters of science-based medicine actually had the abilities and powers attributed to us. I mean, what's the good of being accused of running a conspiracy to crush any sort of "unconventional" or "alternative" medicine if we don't actually have the power to crush unconventional and alternative medicine? Then, sometimes, there are posts that make me really wish that my bloggy skeptic friends and the skeptic organizations to which I belong actually had the power to do the things…
oracknows | July 1, 2012If there's a law that I view as a horrible, horrible, law, it's the Dietary Supplement Health Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA of 1994). It is a law that blog bud and former ScienceBlogs blogger Dr. Peter Lipson has rightly called a travesty of a mockery of a sham, and, quite frankly, I think he has been too easy on it. Clearly, if there is a single instance of a massive triumph of the forces of quackery in the U.S. that I could point to, the DSHEA of 1994 would be it. This particular misbegotten law in essence opened the floodgates for the sale of dubious supplements and turned a relatively…
oracknows | June 29, 2012Remember California Bill AB 2109? I've written about it at least a couple of times before. In fact, for some reason, the comment section of this post on AB 2109 suddenly come alive again a couple of days ago, with antivaccinationists infiltrating it, much to the annoyance of my regular commenters. It turns out that the reason was that a couple of days ago AB 2109 came up for discussion in the California Senate Health Committee (and passed to be sent out to the full Senate for a vote), after having passed the California House a couple of months ago. I also now know why antivaccinationists…
oracknows | June 27, 2012And now for something completely different.
Except that it isn't really. I say that it isn't really different because, although this post will seem to be about politics, in reality it will be about a common topic on this blog: Anti-science. And where is this anti-science? Sadly, it's in the platform of a major party of one of the largest states in the country. It also meshes with the anti-science inherent in a lot of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and all comes together in one place: The proposed 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas. It's all there, as you…
oracknows | June 26, 2012Remember Luc Montagnier? Sure, you do. He's the Nobel Laureate whose identification of the virus that causes AIDS garnered him plaudits, laurels, and, of course, the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Unfortunately, since winning the Nobel Prize, from a scientific standpoint, Montagnier's been on a downward spiral. Sadly, it didn't take long after his Nobel acceptance speech for disturbing signs of crankery and quackery to appear. For instance, Montagnier published a paper that implied that DNA could teleport, using this study, whose results were almost certainly the result of contaminants in…
oracknows | June 26, 2012No matter how you slice it, I've been at this blogging thing a long time. it's been over seven years now. It's been even longer than that, though, because before that cold gray Saturday afternoon in September when I started farting around with Blogger and ended giving birth to the first iteration of Respectful Insolence, I had been sparring with quacks, cranks, and various other promoters of pseudoscience for at least five years before. Even after all that time, however, it's humbling and amazing to contemplate that I haven't seen it all, no matter how much at times I might feel that I have.…