complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | November 8, 2011I've written about the concept of "misinformed" consent with respect to the anti-vaccine movement. To summarize, "misinformed consent" is a perversion of the concept of informed consent in which cranks claim to be championing true informed consent (and, by implication, that opponents have not) when in fact they are presenting a scientifically unsupportable assessment of the risks and benefits of an intervention. In the case of vaccines, anti-vaccine activists play up the risks of vaccines far beyond what science supports, attributing to them, for instance, risks of autism, autoimmune disease…
oracknows | November 5, 2011Fridays are usually a bad time for blogging for me, but it's a choice, not due to any circumstances. Usually, on Friday nights, I consciously make an effort to stay away from the computer and the blog. Frequently, I'm tired, and not infrequently I'll crash on the couch, only to wake up after midnight and wander upstairs to bed. Consequently, when something happens on Friday afternoon or evening, I often don't find out about it until Saturday morning, which means I probably won't blog about it before Monday because I've intentionally been trying not to post anything on the weekends. As hard as…
oracknows | November 4, 2011About a month ago, I discussed a rather disturbing development, namely the initiative by Dr. Andrew Weil to set up something he was going to call the American Board of Integrative Medicine, all for the purpose of creating a system of board certification for physicians practicing "integrative medicine" (IM), or, as I prefer to call them, physicians who like to integrate pseudoscience with their science, quackery with their medicine. At the time, I referred to it as a board certification in woo. Was I harsh? Yes. Accurate? Also yes. Unfortunately, many medical centers, both academic and…
oracknows | November 2, 2011The nearest major airport to me happens to be a Delta Airlines hub. Consequently, nine times out of ten, whenever I have to fly anywhere I'm usually stuck using Delta Airlines. It's actually not too bad, as major airlines go, better than some but about the same as most. Unfortunately, during the month of November, Delta's in-flight entertainment will leave much to be desired. The reason? Apparently, not satisfied with renting the CBS JumboTron in Times Square last year, this year the highly Orwellian-named National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) somehow slithered their way into the in…
oracknows | November 1, 2011The whole concept of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM), the former of which "complements" science-based medicine with quackery and the latter of which "integrates" pseudoscience-based with science-based medicine. The reason I start out by saying this is to emphasize that CAM/IM is all about using language to persuade that pseudoscience is actually science-based. It's far more about marketing than accurately communicating concepts. In CAM, everything is "holistic," and doctors "care for the whole patient," while "Western medicine" is "reductionistic…
oracknows | October 31, 2011I've been blogging about alternative medicine for nearly seven years and writing about it, either on Usenet or in other forums for several years before. As a result, there are times when I start to think that maybe I've seen it all. And almost every time I start thinking that, I come across something that leaves me scratching my head and either joking about learning something new every day or just scratching my head. This case will be the latter.
Regular readers all know Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger. Adams created NewsTarget.com which later evolved into NaturalNews.com, one of the…
oracknows | October 31, 2011I've written quite a bit about Steve Jobs' battle with pancreatic cancer over the years and, more recently, in the wake of his death nearly four weeks ago. The reason, of course, is that the course of his cancer was of intense interest after it became public knowledge that he had cancer. In particular, what I most considered to be worth discussing was whether the nine month delay between Jobs' diagnosis and his undergoing surgery for his pancreatic insulinoma might have been what did him in. I've made my position very clear on the issue, namely that, although Jobs certainly did himself no…
oracknows | October 28, 2011Despite having found my niche long ago in the medical blogosphere as a skeptic and supporter of science-based medicine, not to mention a scourge of quacks and anti-vaccine activists (no little ego mine!), I rarely, if ever, write about obstetrics. It's always been one area of medicine that I've felt least comfortable with. True, there are some areas of O.B. woo, such as home birth ideology that directly contributes to the deaths of babies, and perhaps I should mention such incidence more often. They are, after all, just as egregious an example of ideology triumphing over science and harming…
oracknows | October 28, 2011It's a wonder no one ever thought of this before (at least, not to my knowledge), but Todd over at Harpocrates Speaks has. Over there today, what do we find?
A Quacktion Figureâ¢:
Ever wanted to enjoy the adoration of tens of others? Had an idea for a new product to patent, but had pesky competitors that needed discrediting? Have you ever dreamed of creating a controversy where there was none? Have you thought that violating research ethics would be a quick way to accomplish all this, but never had the narcissistic chutzpah to pull it off?
Well, now you can.
You'll have to click through to…
oracknows | October 25, 2011I usually don't do requests, at least not very often. As selfish as it might sound, I do this blog mainly to amuse myself, which means that I choose whatever topics interest me and write about them. Believe it or not, I'd probably still be doing this even if my readership were 1/100 of what it is. After all, I did it seven years ago before anyone had ever caught on to the glory (and ego) that is Orac. I've just been fortunate in that, for the most part, the topics that interest me enough to write about them are generally interesting enough to a bunch of people every day to read them. That…
oracknows | October 24, 2011There's a disturbance in the Force. Well, in the Dark Side of the Force, as in the Quack Side of Medicine. Basically, there's a rumble in the quackosphere that reached me through three different quack mailing lists that I'm on for the purpose of gathering material for blogging, including--you guessed it--the mailing list of that One Crank To Rule Them All, Mike Adams. This disturbance?
The Healing Cancer World Summit. The promise?
In this unique program you'll discover...
The therapies these doctors and experts are using that they say can prevent and even treat cancers naturally.
The cancer…
oracknows | October 21, 2011A couple of weeks ago, in the immediate aftermath of Steve Jobs' death, I took issue with the claims of a skeptic that "alternative medicine killed Steve Jobs." At the time, I pointed out that, although it was very clear that Steve Jobs did himself no favors by delaying his initial surgery for nine months after his initial diagnosis, we do not have sufficient information to know what his clinical situation was and therefore how much, if at all, he decreased his odds of survival by not undergoing surgery expeditiously. To recap: Did Steve Jobs harm himself by trying diet and alternative…
oracknows | October 20, 2011Yesterday, I congratulated that bane of anti-vaccine movement and great vaccine scientist, Dr. Paul Offit, for having been accepted into the Institute of Medicine. It's a huge honor, and one well-deserved. At the time, I contrasted Dr. Offit, who has ascended to the highest heights of his profession through good science, with Dr. Andrew Wakefield, architect (or at least the most important architect) of the anti-MMR hysteria that gripped the U.K. in the late 1990s that's only now starting to abate, who is reduced to speaking in front of crank physician groups, being feted at anti-vaccine…
oracknows | October 18, 2011Normally, these days I greet the month of October with a mixture of anticipation and dread. The anticipation stems from October's position as Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Now that somehow I've managed to have a variety of responsibilities with respect to how breast cancer is managed at our cancer institute, suddenly I find that I'm sometimes called upon to do media appearances, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month is one time we can use to get our message out about breast health and breast cancer detection and treatment, not to mention to highlight for the local media some of the cool research…
oracknows | October 9, 2011I debated a while about whether I should take this particular post on. It's not because there isn't a lot of fodder there deserving of that special form of not-so-Respectful Insolence that only Orac, in his usual inimitable fashion, can provide. There most definitely is. The problem, as is sometimes the case when I get on a roll, is that it represents going back to a topic that I've already covered very recently. In fact, it's a topic I've already covered twice, namely Steve Jobs and the insulinoma that ultimately killed him. Last week, I reposted what I wrote about him back in 2009 after he…
oracknows | October 6, 2011It's been a mere two days since Steve Jobs died. Although it hasn't yet been revealed what his specific cause of death was, it's a good bet that Jobs' death was due to a recurrence of his pancreatic cancer, first diagnosed in 2003, for which he underwent surgery in 2004 and ultimately a liver transplant in 2009. It's a history that I outlined yesterday (at least up to the time the original posts were written) by reposting two posts I wrote about his liver transplant back in 2009. But a funny thing has happened since then, and that's that Jobs has become a flashpoint in an argument that has…
oracknows | October 4, 2011He's ba-ack.
Has it really only been two weeks? A mere two weeks since everybody's favorite advocate of The One Quackery to Rule Them All promised the woo-friendly readers of the "health" section of that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post that he would "provide further specific evidence of the unscientific attitude and actions from those individuals and organizations who are leading the campaign against homeopathy." Like pretty much every skeptic who's made any sort of name for himself, no matter how minor, in having fun taking down the pseudoscientific nonsense known as…
oracknows | October 2, 2011I've been harshly critical of the entire concept of "integrative medicine" (IM), which has over the last few years nearly supplanted the former term used for non-science-based medicine or medicine based on prescientific ideas represented as though it were scientific medicine, "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM). Indeed, just last month I pointed out how IM is far more about marketing than it is about science or medicine, and over the last few years I've been particularly harsh on the concept of "integrative oncology," which is actually being promoted as a legitimate "subspecialty"…
oracknows | September 28, 2011People wonder why scientists involved in controversial areas are reluctant to address the public. Courtesy of our favorite band of anti-vaccine bloggers at the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, we see yet another reason why. Yes, AoA's resident attack poodle Jake Crosby decided to disrupt the Q&A session of a public talk (videocast here) by the editor-in-chief of BMJ, Fiona Godlee:
Throughout the question and answer session, I patiently waited my turn, until finally called on by Dr. Glass (you can view the exchange on the 54:00 of the NIH Videocast):
"Yeah? Introduce yourself…
oracknows | September 27, 2011For some reason, when it comes to so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) therapies, acupuncture gets a pass. Homeopathy, for example, is based on ideas so inherently ridiculous that they quite properly attract the scorn of skeptics and advocates of science-based medicine everywhere, stating, as it does, that diluting a remedy to nonexistence makes it stronger, but only if you shake vigorously between each serial dilution step. The same is true of reiki, which, as I've said time and time again, is nothing more than faith healing based on Eastern mystical beliefs rather than…