complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | September 25, 2011When you've been at this blogging thing as long as I have, it's possible to be shocked at how long you find yourself commenting on the same story. As I approach the end of the seventh year of Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful, I find these "senior blogging moments" popping up from time to time. One such story is that of a young man named Abraham Cherrix. I first learned of Cherrix back in June 2006, when, a few months after having been diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma at age 15, Cherrix, supported by his mother, decided that he didn't want to take any more chemotherapy and…
oracknows | September 21, 2011Perhaps the biggest bête noire for me is the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers; so whenever I see particularly egregious examples, it gets my fingers twitching over the keyboard, ready to lay down some not-so-Respectful Insolence. So it was last Friday when I happened across an article published nearly two years ago in The Hospitalist entitled Growth Spurt: Complementary and alternative medicine use doubles, which began with this anecdote:
Despite intravenous medication, a young boy in status epilepticus had the pediatric ICU team at the University of…
oracknows | September 21, 2011We get hate mail. Or I do. True, I don't get an inordinate amount of hate mail, but I do get some. A lot of the time, it's rather boring and predictable, which is why I don't often respond to it on the blog, although sometimes against my better judgment I respond by e-mail. That happens less and less frequently, though, given my e-mail volume between work, personal life, and the blog.
Less tiresome is hate mail from proponents of alternative medicine whom I have apparently really, really annoyed. Well, sometimes it's less boring. Often it's very boring indeed, but sometimes when I'm in the…
oracknows | September 20, 2011Whenever I write about the woo that is reiki, I feel obligated to point out just what reiki is. Sure, it might be repetitive, but I hope my regular readers will indulge me. I never know when new readers will pop in, and it is necessary to do a bit of review. Basically, reiki is faith healing that substitutes Eastern mystical beliefs for the more "conventional" Christian beliefs that undergird the the scams of faith healers like Benny Hinn or Peter Popoff. Indeed, that's one reason why the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declared that reiki should not be offered in Catholic hospitals, and…
oracknows | September 14, 2011Oh goody.
Goody, goody, goody, goody, goody.
As I sat down to lay down a bit of the old ultrainsolence on a hapless bit of psuedoscience, I was near despair. For whatever reason, there didn't appear to be anything new out there for me to sink my teeth into. True, when this has happened in the past, I've often delved deep into the Folder of Woo in search of tasty tidbits of quackery saved for just this eventuality, but I really hate to do that. After all, it might be good to apply science, critical thinking, and reason to a particularly nonsensical bit of pseudoscience (which is fun) or to a…
oracknows | September 13, 2011Unfortunately, I don't get to see very many movies these days. My wife and I both lead very busy lives, and with periodic spasms of grant writing, plus several new administrative responsibilities, it's just hard. Last weekend, however, a movie that I'd rather like to see came out. Unfortunately, I haven't seen it yet; so I can't give you a definitive review, but the movie caught my interest because it shows at least one thing that I don't recall ever having seen in a movie before. The movie is Contagion, and here's its trailer:
It's not so much the storyline that interests me. After all,…
oracknows | September 11, 2011If there's one thing about anti-vaccine activists that is virtually their sine qua non, it's an utter lack of understanding of science. Actually, a more accurate description would be that it's a highly selective understanding of science. Nowhere do I find this to be the case as much as when I see anti-vaccine loons pulling what I like to call the "toxins gambit," or, as I've put it before, "Why are we injecting TOXINS into our babies?" It's a gambit that anti-vaccine activists seemingly never tire of, and it comes in a wide variety of forms, but they all have one of two things in common.…
oracknows | September 9, 2011ORAC NOTE: Work kept me out late last night going out to dinner with a visiting professor. Fortunately, it was actually pretty fun. Unfortunately, it kept me from cooking up a heapin' helpin' of the Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, that my readers crave. So instead, here's a repost from elsewhere. I didn't think I could use it because the deadline for the survey I discuss was originally September 1. Fortunately, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) extended the deadline to September 16, making this post relevant for exactly one more week. Enjoy! And go…
oracknows | September 7, 2011One aspect of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) is the resurgence of practice of what has frequently been called "traditional Chinese medicine" (TCM). I've pointed out before that TCM is a prescientific system of medicine based largely on superstition and vitalism. Indeed, where ancient Greek and European medical systems believed that disease is due to imbalances in the four humors, TCM postulates disease to be due to imbalances in the five elements: Water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. These elements are thought to be related by cycles known as the Shen or Nourishing Cycle and…
oracknows | September 7, 2011I don't recall how many times I've said lately that I detest the term "integrative medicine." As I've pointed out time and time again, it's the preferred "successor," if you will, to the term "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) (at least among the woo-friendly). After all, as I've pointed out before, it just won't do to have the fashionable quackery du jour be considered as only being "complementary" or "alternative" to real medicine. That implies at best that it has a subsidiary role to real medicine and at worst that it is not real medicine, being "alternative" and all. The whole…
oracknows | September 5, 2011Over the weekend, I chilled out a bit, at least as far as the blog was concerned. I won't make too much of a secret of it, but thanks to the new policy of the new owners I have a decision to make. In the meantime, while I'm dithering, you, my readers, were deluging me with requests. Well, it wasn't exactly a deluge. Maybe three or four e-mails. But, hey, over a dull holiday weekend, when I spend most of the time either working on a grant or working in my yard? That's a deluge! Never let it be said, either, that I don't give the people what they want (usually, at least). So what are the latest…
oracknows | September 5, 2011This happens to be a holiday weekend. Believe it or not, sometimes even Orac needs a break from life, the universe, and every blog, particularly this one. I'll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, I realize that I've posted videos like this before (in fact, I'm sure that at some point or another I've linked to this one, but, hey, it's a holiday). However, this one is amazingly prescient, given that it dates back to the early 1990s.
Have fun commenting, and Orac will return on Tuesday--or even possibly before that....
oracknows | September 1, 2011One of my interests in skepticism and critical thinking has been the similarity in the fallacious arguments, approach to data, and general behavior of those who are--to put it generously--not so skeptical or scientific in their approach to life. I'm talking about believers in the paranormal, quacks, anti-vaccine activists, conspiracy theory mavens, Holocaust deniers, creationists, anthropogenic global warming denialists, and cranks of all stripes. Indeed, it is this similarity in mindset that led Mark Hoofnagle to coin the term "crank magnetism," a perfect description of how people who…
oracknows | August 31, 2011It's one of those things that can't be repeated too many times, but homeopathy is ridiculous. In fact, so ridiculous is homeopathy that I don't usually write about it all that often. The reason is that, like homeopathic dilutions, a bit of skeptical blogging about homeopathy goes a long, long way (although I'm not sure whether diluting the blogging makes it stronger). True, anti-vaccine ideas are often just as ridiculous, but they're also dangerous to children, which is why I'll sometimes write about nothing but anti-vaccine nonsense for several days in a row. Homeopathy, on the other hand,…
oracknows | August 30, 2011Sometimes I feel a little bit guilty when I'm writing a post deconstructing anti-vaccine nonsense, "alternative medicine" quackery, or some other form of pseudoscience. This guilt usually derives when I end up picking a target that's just too easy, a study that's just so mind-numbingly, brain-meltingly awful that it's not much of a challenge, even though at the time I perceive that it needs to be done. I suppose it's like the feeling that a professional sports team might feel if it were ever paired with a high school team--or even a junior high--team for a game. In fact, I was half-tempted…
oracknows | August 29, 2011I detest the term "integrative medicine," which is what promoters of "alternative medicine" pivoted to call "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) when they decided that they needed to lose the word "alternative" altogether. After all, no longer were CAM practitioners content to have their favorite quackery be "complementary" to real medicine because "complementary" implied a subsidiary position and they wanted to be co-equals with physicians and science- and evidence-based medicine. The term "integrative medicine" (IM) served their purpose perfectly, and "integrative medicine"…
oracknows | August 28, 2011Whenever I refer to an anti-vaccine activist as an "anti-vaxer" or an "anti-vaccinationist," I can always count on outraged and self-righteous denunciations from the the person who is being labeled as "anti-vaccine." "Oh, no," she'll say, "I'm not 'anti-vaccine.' I'm pro-safe vaccine." or "I'm a vaccine safety activist." Of couse, over the years, I've learned that the vast majority of such people are deluded in that they probably do really believe that they aren't anti-vaccine, but everything they do and say is pretty much always anti-vaccine. It's easy enough to tell just by asking a couple…
oracknows | August 25, 2011A couple of days ago, I couldn't resist discussing a recent article in the New York Times about recent discoveries in cancer research. I considered the article to be a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. While the article did a pretty good job of describing recent discoveries about how noncoding RNA, the tumor microenvironment, and even microbes are involved in the pathogenesis of cancer, it had an annoying spin that portrayed some of these discoveries as being much shinier and newer than they actually are. At the time, I noted that quacks would certainly use this article as a jumping-off…
oracknows | August 24, 2011One of the things that distinguishes evidence-based medicine (EBM) and science-based medicine (SBM) is how the latter takes into account prior probability that a therapy is likely to work when considering clinical trials. My favorite example to demonstrate this difference, because it's so stark and obvious, is homeopathy. Homeopathy, as regular readers of this blog no doubt know by now, is a mystical, magical system of medicine based on two principles. The first is the law of similars, commonly phrased as "like cures like"; i.e., the way to treat symptoms is to use a smaller amount of…
oracknows | August 22, 2011Chiropractic has origins in mysticism and vitalistic thinking. Given its popularity and seeming mainstream acceptance, it's easy to forget that these days. Fortunately, Daryl Cunningham reminds us of the history of chiropractic, including its philosophical underpinnings and potential complications: