complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | February 5, 2012It's amazing how fast six months can pass, isn't it? Well, almost six months, anyway, as it was five and a half months ago that I wrote about a particularly execrable example of quackademic medicine in the form of a study that actually looked at an "energy healing" modality known as "energy chelation" as a treatment for cancer chemotherapy-induced fatigue. Actually, the study design itself wasn't so bad, leaving aside the utter ludicrousness of the concept of "energy chelation." Rather, it was how the authors spun interpreted their results that set my head spinning. Surprisingly, a letter to…
oracknows | February 3, 2012A couple of weeks ago, I made the observation that there seems to have been a--shall we say?--realignment in one of the central arguments that proponents of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM) make. Back in the day (say, a few years ago), such CAM practitioners and apologists used to try very, very hard to argue that their modalities had actual efficacy, that they had actual, measurable effects that made them medicine rather than woo. Never mind that even back then they had been trying for at least a couple of decades to come up with preclinical and…
oracknows | February 1, 2012For as many benefits as the Internet and the web have brought us in the last two decades, there are also significant downsides. I could go into all the societal changes brought about by the proliferation of this new technology, not the least of which (to me, at least) is the newfound ability of someone like me to find an audience. After all, pre-Internet and pre-blog, I could try to write books, or I could try to get onto TV and radio, but those are very difficult things to do. Over the last seven years, steadily blogging, I've built up an audience. True, compared to the "old media" and the…
oracknows | January 25, 2012It's been nearly a year since I last discussed a most unusual malady. Part of the reason is that the opportunity to discuss it hasn't occurred recently; usually I need some spark or incident to "inspire" me to write about something, and there just hasn't been any Morgellons news that's caught my eye since then. However, another part of the reason, I must admit, is that writing about this particular condition almost always brings sufferers out of the woodwork, castigating me the way antivaccinationists like to castigate me for challenging the scientific basis of their preferred pseudoscience.…
oracknows | January 25, 2012Ha! I must admit, I've said probably about 50% of these things at one time or another, maybe more:
Hmmmm. Maybe I need to come up with new "shit."
Oh, and, by the way, I've been mentioned on PZ's blog more times than I can remember over the last seven years. So there! (Oh, wait. Does that mean PZ won't ever mention me again. Never mind. I take it back.)
oracknows | January 24, 2012If there's one thing about homeopaths, it's that they're indefatigable in their dedication to their unique brand of pseudoscience. They're also endlessly protean in their ability to induce their explanations for how homeopathy is supposed to "work" to evolve into endless forms not so beautiful. If it's not the claim that "like cures like" is some sort of immutable law of nature or that diluting a remedy somehow makes it stronger, it's pivoting to the claim that water has "memory." If it's not that, then homeopaths and homeopathy apologists invoke quantum entanglement that somehow works at the…
oracknows | January 23, 2012I've been an observer and student of the antivaccine movement for nearly a decade now, although my intensive education began almost seven years ago, in early 2005, not long after I started blogging. It was then that I first encountered several "luminaries" of the antivaccine movement both throughout the blogosphere and sometimes even commenting on my blog itself. I'm talking about "luminaries" such as J.B. Handley, who is the founder of Generation Rescue and was its leader and main spokesperson; that is, until he managed to recruit spokesmodel Jenny McCarthy to be its public face, and Dr. Jay…
oracknows | January 23, 2012I was disturbed several months ago when I learned that the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, had agreed to be the keynote speaker at the Eight International Society for Integrative Oncology Conference in Cleveland, OH. I say "doubly" disturbed because it disturbed me that Francis Collins would agree to speak at such a function and, perhaps even more, because the host institution was Case Western Reserve University, the institution where I both completed my surgery residency and my PhD in Physiology and Biophysics. Sadly, it now appears that my old stomping…
oracknows | January 19, 2012It's a new year, but some topics remain the same. One of these is the case of the highly dubious cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have discovered anticancer compounds in the blood known as antineoplastons, conducts "clinical trials" for which he charges patients and whose results he are largely unpublished, and of late has started marketing a do-it-yourself "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy" that--surprise! surprise!--almost always involves antineoplastons. More importantly, contrary to Dr. Burzynski's claim that he doesn't use chemotherapy and that his therapy…
oracknows | January 17, 2012I had been planning on either discussing a study or analyzing another cancer cure testimonial, but things have been (mostly) too serious around the ol' blog the last few days. What with depressing posts about the return of whooping cough thanks to antivaccine idiocy, more evidence that Andrew Wakefield is a despicable human being, and evidence that there are equally despicable ideas prevalent in "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), I was starting to enter one of my periodic periods of depression brought on by contemplating the sheer scope of human gullibility and stupidity. I…
oracknows | January 17, 2012Last week, I wrote about how advocates of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integtrative medicine" (IM), having failed to demonstrate efficacy for the vast majority of the unscientific, anti-scientific, and/or pseudosciencitific treatment modalities, many based on prescientific concepts of how human physiology and disease work, have started trying to co-opt placebo effects as their own. In essence, given that the larger and better designed the study the more it is obvious that most CAM therapies do no better than placebo, CAM/IM advocates have decided to embrace their inner…
oracknows | January 11, 2012For all the good things about my life there are, there is one bad thing, and that was that I was born so that I reached high school age right at the height of the disco era. At least, that's the way I viewed it at the time because at the time, like many teenaged boys of that era, particularly in Detroit, I hated disco. Loathed it. Despised it. I used to draw cartoons in the back of my notebooks showing Robert Plant destroying disco records, and I was a card-carrying member of DREAD. Not for me were the Bee Gees, who were so huge during my sophomore and junior years in high school, although I…
oracknows | January 11, 2012When I wrote last week about the latest legal thuggery against an opponent of antivaccine pseudoscience, this time by hero of the antivaccine movement, who sued investigative reporter Brian Deer for defamation, there was one thing about the case that confused me, one aspect that didn't add up to me. Part of it was why Wakefield sued Brian Deer over an article he wrote for the BMJ a year ago, although in retrospect it's become apparent to me that it was almost certainly because the statute of limitations for a libel action in Texas is one year. More importantly, the silence of the antivaccine…
oracknows | January 9, 2012I've spent a lot of time over the years looking at cranks, examining crank science (i.e., pseudoscience), and trying to figure out how to inoculate people against crankery. Because I'm a physician, I tend to do it mostly in the realm of medicine by critically examining "alternative" medical claims and discussing the scientific basis of medicine, both with respect to those "alternative" claims and to more conventional medical claims. However, I don't limit my skepticism and critical thinking just to medicine, although lately I think that I've been "specializing" too much, almost totally…
oracknows | January 8, 2012Three and a half years ago, I bought a new car. The reason why I mention this as a means of beginning this post is because that car had something I had never had in a car before, namely Sirius XM satellite radio preinstalled. Curious, I subscribed, and I now barely listen to regular radio anymore. A couple of years after I had bought the car, a new channel was added to the lineup, a channel called Radio Classics. I don't know how I discovered it, but I rapidly became hooked on what's commonly referred to as old time radio. Basically, that's classic radio of the sort that was broadcast between…
oracknows | January 6, 2012It's no secret that I've been highly critical of The Huffington Post, at least of its approach to science and medicine. In fact, it was a mere three weeks after Arianna Huffington launched her blog back in 2005 that I noticed something very distressing about it, namely that it had recruited someone who would later become and "old friend" (and punching bag) of the blog, Dr. Jay Gordon, as well as the mercury militia stalwart David Kirby, among others. As a result, antivaccination lunacy was running rampant on HuffPo, even in its infancy. Many, many, many more examples followed very quickly.…
oracknows | January 4, 2012Finally, I think I've found this blog's theme song:
As I've asked so many times before: Dammit! Where's all that filthy big pharma lucre I've been told by quacks, cranks, and antivaccinationists that I'm getting for toeing the big pharma line? After all, if I'm going to work so hard as a pharma shill, I gots ta get paid, yo. Come on, I still want to live the dream of sitting back in my sweatpants and sweatshirt behind a massive computer screen, pouring out anti-CAM screeds, and then waiting for all that cash money to roll in as I serve my corporate masters! Lord Draconis Zeneca knows.
Wait…
oracknows | January 4, 2012Let's face it. The vast majority of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM) therapies are nothing more than placebo medicine. This should be so abundantly clear to readers who have followed this blog, Science-Based Medicine, and/or Neurologica Blog more than a few weeks that I shouldn't have to repeat it yet again, but I feel that it bears repeating today as an introduction to today's subject matter. CAM/IM is almost all placebo medicine, and placebos effects are poorly understood (or even misunderstood), even among physicians. It is this misunderstanding…
oracknows | January 3, 2012As hard as it to believe, it's 2012 now. (I know, I know, I say that pretty much every year.) I've also been on vacation for the last week, which makes getting back into the swing of things a bit difficult. For one thing, we seem to have suffered an infestation of particularly brain dead alt-med and antivaccine trolls that drove comment totals on some posts into the hundreds. I must admit, that was something I didn't expect between Christmas and New Years, when blogging and commenting are usually as slow as everything else outside of retail that time of year. I must admit, though, that it was…
oracknows | January 2, 2012Best analogy ever? I think it's a contender, straight from Balloon Juice:
The Republican party in Iowa reminds me of a patient with a terminal disease (Romneyitis) desperately turning to alternative medacine. They've cycled through homeopathy (Bachmann), naturopathy (Cain), chelation (Perry) and aromatherapy (Paul). Now they've hit the final frontier--urotherapy. I'm glad that I've never been so desperately ill that I've contemplated drinking my own piss, but I can imagine what it might feel like if I consider the level of desperation needed to vote for Rick Santorum.
I must admit, I laughed…