complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | April 10, 2012Repeat after me one more time: Just because something is natural does not necessarily mean it's effective or, more importantly, safe. If there's one thing common among virtually all purveyors of "alternative" medicine, it's that they fetishize anything they consider "natural." To them, "natural" is always better. At the very least it's better than those evil big pharma-produced purified drugs that they so distrust. Of course, often forgotten in all of this is that any herbal remedy that does anything at all from a physiological standpoint to reverse disease or make you feel better does so…
oracknows | April 3, 2012Note: Today's a travel day. I'm driving home from the AACR. As a result, I decided to post something that appeared elsewhere, doing a quick edit to make it a bit more "insolent." I realize that since the show I discuss aired an episode during which he featured a psychic medium in a segment called Medium Vs. Medicine: Char Margolis Shares Afterlife Secrets. I meant to blog it, but somehow I missed my window of opportunity. Oh, well, maybe I still will. Or maybe not. It's too painful, and the window has passed. In the meantime, there's this blast from the recent past.
It's not a secret that I…
oracknows | March 29, 2012Since when did Opposing Views become NaturalNews.com?
Anyone who's read this blog for a while knows that NaturalNews.com is one of the wretchedest hives of scum and quackery anywhere on the Internet, surpassing even The Huffington Post. Indeed, so full of misinformation, pseudoscience, quackery, and outright lies, all spiced up with a heapin' helpin' of pure New World Order, Alex Jones-style winguttery is NaturalNews.com that I'm hard-pressed to think of a website that is more of a black hole of utter nonsense. Whale.to, maybe.
So why do I compare Opposing Views to NaturalNews.com? Is that…
oracknows | March 22, 2012I'll give the Canary Party credit for one thing, if credit you can consider it. It's persistent in its promotion of antivaccine pseudoscience.
Somehow, someone at Current TV decided that it would be a good idea to show an utterly unbalanced, utterly cranky, utterly propagandistic "documentary" (The Greater Good) that seeks to demonize vaccines as the cause of autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune disease, and, apparently tooth decay, too. (I'm joking about the last one--but just barely.) I wrote about its misinformation, cherry picking, and relying on anecdotes rather than science…
oracknows | March 20, 2012Sometimes you find good skepticism in strange places. One example of this has been Cracked.com. Normally, Cracked.com is a humor site based on the magazine that I used to read sometimes back in 1970s. Unfortunately, the magazine folded several years ago, but the website lives on. For example, Cracked.com once did a snarky article making fun of the "heroes" of the antivaccine movement and contrasting them to "villains" like (of course!) Paul Offit. It even featured for emphasis the infamous "baby eating" poster that Age of Autism ran a couple of years ago that featured Steve Novella, Paul…
oracknows | March 19, 2012A science-based blogger's work is never done, apparently.
I'll show you what I mean in a minute. But first, I just have to make a simple observation. Pseudoscience, be it quackery, evolution denial, denial of anthropogenic global warming, antivaccine nonsense, or other forms of pseudoscience, apparently never dies. No matter how many times it's slapped down, no matter how often and how vigorously it's refuted, it always seems to rise again. In fact, I used to liken pseudoscience and quackery to zombies, but that's a bad analogy. After all, in most zombie lore (as told in books and movies) a…
oracknows | March 18, 2012About a month ago, I wrote about a study that looked at metrics of patient satisfaction and compared them to hard outcomes often used to evaluate quality of care, including frequency of emergency room usage, frequency of hospitalization, and overall mortality. Even though these days there appears to be an implicit assumption that increased patient satisfaction comes about as a result of better quality of care (or at least that patient satisfaction correlates with quality of care), this study found almost exactly the opposite. Patients who were in the highest quartile for patient satisfaction…
oracknows | March 15, 2012If there's one quack who both amuses and appalls me at the same time, it's Robert O. Young. You remember Robert O. Young, don't you? He's the guy who thinks that all disease is caused by excess acid. I've written about him quite a few times over the last several years. For instance, he amused me when he declared that cancers are all liquids, and this liquid is the "toxic acidic waste product of metabolism or energy consumption." In fact, he goes beyond that by saying that the tumor making up the cancer is the body's protective mechanism to encapsulate "spoiled" or "poisonous" cells. And what…
oracknows | March 12, 2012"Patient-centered care."
It's the new buzzword in patient care. Personally, I find the term mor ethan a little Orwellian in that it can mean so many things. Basically, it's a lot like Humpty Dumpty when he says to Alice, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." So it is with "patient-centered care." It's such a wonderfully--shall we say?--flexible term. That's why I took more than a little interest a week and a half ago when I picked up the New England Journal of Medicine and saw in the Perspective section three articles about "patient-centered"…
oracknows | March 2, 2012I was originally going to write about an amazing article that appeared in the NEJM today, but then, as happens all too often, something more compelling caught my eye. Unfortunately, it's compelling in exactly the wrong way. It's infuriating and saddening, all at the same time. It's also yet another example of how it's so very, very difficult to blog about these cases. Yes, unfortunately, it's Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski again in the news, and this time around he's managed to snare yet another unfortunate family into believing the hype about his "antineoplastons," his "personalized, gene-targeted…
oracknows | March 1, 2012I've always been reluctant to attribute antiscientific attitudes to one political persuasion or another--and justly so, or so I thought. While it's true that antiscience on the right is definitely more prominent these days, with the Republican candidates conducting virtual seminars on how to deny established science. Evolution? They don't believe in it because, apparently, Jesus told them not to. Anthropogenic global warming? they don't buy that, either, because to admit that human activity is resulting in significant climate change would be to be forced to concede that industry isn't an…
oracknows | February 28, 2012Yesterday was a rough day for me; so I'll be uncharacteristically brief today.
As I've pointed out time and time again, these days, advocates of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) don't like it so much anymore when their preferred quackery is referred to as "CAM." Now the preferred term has--shall we say?--evolved to a happy term designed to paint their woo as being co-equal with real medicine: "integrative medicine" in a way that the term "CAM" does not. After all, CAM is "complementary," which implies that it's subsidiary, the icing on the cake so to speak, and it's "alternative…
oracknows | February 24, 2012Back in September, I merrily applied a little not-so-Respectful Insolence to the service of deconstructing the overwhelmingly silly fear mongering by a group known as SANE Vax over the alleged discovery of HPV DNA in the HPV vaccine. SANE Vax, as you may recall, is a group founded by a woman named Norma Erickson dedicated to spreading misinformation about the HPV vaccine. If you peruse the SANE Vax website, you'll see that the common antivaccine tropes are all there; they're just directed mainly at the HPV vaccine. The hysterial fear mongering over the alleged discovery of DNA fragments of…
oracknows | February 23, 2012Any regular reader of this blog knows who Andrew Wakefield is. He's the British gastroenterologist who almost singlehandedly ignited a panic about the MMR vaccine (well, not quite single-handedly; the sensationalistic British press helped a lot) with his shoddy, fraudulent research linking the MMR vaccine to "autistic enterocolitis" and then later to autism itself. Ultimately, his support for non-science-based speculation (not to mention his unethical behavior) caught up with him, and he was "struck off," which is a lovely bit of British verbiage describing his having his license to practice…
oracknows | February 23, 2012There's something about the prefix "anti" that provokes all too many people, even some who consider themselves "skeptics," to clutch at their pearls and feel faint. Antivaccine? Oh, no, you can't say that! They're not "antivaccine"? Who could be so nutty as to be "antivaccine"? Even members of the antivaccine movement don't like the term because even they realize that to be antivaccine is akin to being "anti" Mom, apple pie, and America. So they come up with the defense that they are not "antivaccine" but rather "pro-safe vaccine." They'll come up with silly analogies about how being for…
oracknows | February 20, 2012
Like many geeks, I enjoy The Big Bang Theory. I know, I know, you're shocked to hear that, but it's true. I've seen nearly every episode since the first season. Over the last couple of seasons, the male-centric show has been considerably improved by its move towards more of an ensemble cast that includes two new female characters: Bernadette Rostenkowski, played by Melissa Rauch, who is Howard's girlfriend, and Amy Farrah Fowler, played by Mayim Bialik, who is Sheldon's girlfriend. Both characters are smart and in many ways as geeky as the guys, but in a different way.
Oddly enough, I…
oracknows | February 19, 2012If there's one thing that purveyors of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)--or, the preferred term these days, "integrative medicine" (IM)--and hospital administrators seem to agree on, it's that "patient satisfaction" (whatever that means) is very, very important. Hospital administrators live and die by patient satisfaction surveys, in particular a common measurement derived from Press-Ganey surveys. In fact, Press-Ganey itself sells its services as "driving performance excellence" in health care. The inherent assumption is that if patients are satisfied then they are doing a good…
oracknows | February 16, 2012Since 2012 was rung in a month and a half ago, I've been writing a lot more about placebo medicine than I have in a while. Specifically, I've written a lot more about placebo effects than usual. This proliferation of posts on the topic was sparked by how Harvard University's very own not-a-PhD faculty, credulous promoter of acupuncture and all things "integrative medicine," and generally clever propagandist for woo, Ted Kaptchuk seemed, like Elvis, to be everywhere for a while. The message he was spreading was, although he didn't admit it or put it that way, a response to the growing body of…
oracknows | February 15, 2012It's been a while since I mentioned Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston doctor who has somehow managed over the last thirty-plus years to treat cancer patients with something he calls "antineoplastons" without ever actually producing strong evidence that they actually cure patients, increase the chances of long-term survival, or even improve disease-free progression. Although there was a tiny bit of prior plausibility behind the concept--albeit only very tiny--back in the 1980s, the relentless drip, drip, drip of negative evidence, coupled with Burzynski's failure to advance his therapy…
oracknows | February 14, 2012One of the most potent strategies used by promoters of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)--or, as its proponents like to call it these days, "integrative medicine" (IM)--is in essence an argumentum ad populum; i.e., an appeal to popularity. Specifically, they like to use the variant of argumentum ad populum known as the "bandwagon effect," in which they try to persuade patients and physicians that they should get with the IM program because, in essence, everyone else is doing it and it's sweeping the nation. Not coincidentally, this is one type of method of persuasion much favored…