complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | May 12, 2011It's been a busy and rough week. The news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, with the release of one bad study and another highly touted great white hope of a legal study. As much as I'm tired of blogging about vaccines this week, it's still mandatory for me to note that something very wonderful has happened. So bear with me, please. Remember how recently, after well over five years of his flouting the law, the State of Maryland suspended "autism biomed" quack Dr. Mark Geier's medical license? In fact, Maryland didn't just suspend it, but emergently suspended it. Well, on…
oracknows | May 12, 2011Recently, there have been grumblings in the ranks of Orac-philes. All is not entirely well. Or, at least, all is less well than usual. Even more unusual, I feel your pain. I really do. We've been enduring a stretch when the anti-vaccine movement has been unusually busy for an unusually long time, leading vaccines to take over and dominate as the main topic of this blog for more than the last week. This has led not only to my getting tired of the topic, but to some of you apparently becoming tired as well of the sheer burning stupid that only the anti-vaccine movement can lay down with such…
oracknows | May 10, 2011Knowing what you are destined to blog about on a given night three days beforehand is a two-edged sword. On the plus side, I don't have to worry about writer's block or lack of suitable material to use as fodder for my Insolence, Respectful and not-so-Respectful, and that's usually a good thing. On the other hand, by the time the evening rolls around, my attention can easily stray to other things, and I might not be as enthusiastic about deconstructing the latest example of, for example, anti-vaccine idiocy as I was when I first learned of its impending arrival. Yet not blogging about it…
oracknows | May 10, 2011As hard as it is for me to believe sometimes, I've been at this blogging biz a long time--well over six years now. However, I've been engaged, in one form or another, in combatting pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and crankery online since the late 1990s. Although I try hard not to fall into the same cognitive traps that a certain pediatrician to the stars does, namely considering my own anecdotal experience to be superior to controlled studies, that is not to say that personal experience is without value. At least, that's what I was thinking when I came across Steve Novella's post A failure to…
oracknows | May 3, 2011One of the most persistent myths is one that's been particularly and doggedly resistant to evidence, science, clinical trials, epidemiology, and reason. It's also a myth that I've been writing about since a couple of months after the beginning of this blog. Specifically, I'm referring to the now scientifically discredited myth that the mercury-containing thimerosal preservative that used to be in quite a few childhood vaccines causes autism. The myth began in the late 1990s and was later fed by the publication of David Kirby's book Evidence of Harm, which was basically a paean to various…
oracknows | April 26, 2011NOTE: Dr. Novella has written up a detailed description of his experiences on The Dr. Oz Show. Please read it. Also note that the online video for Dr. Novella's appearance is now available:
Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 1
Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 2
Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 3
When I first learned that Dr. Steve Novella, Yale neurologist, blogger, and host of the popular skeptical podcast the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe was going to be on The Dr. Oz Show, I was concerned. After all, this is the same physician who had in…
oracknows | April 26, 2011"Health freedom." It's a battle cry frequently used by supporters of "alternative" medicine against what they perceive to be persecution by the medical and scientific establishment that uses the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and other federal agencies charged with regulating pharmaceuticals, food, cosmetics, and medical devices in order to protect the public against fraud, adulterated food, and quackery. It's a potent argument to those not versed in skepticism and science-based medicine, and even to many who are. After all, Who could argue with "health freedom"?…
oracknows | April 22, 2011Steve Salzberg is a man after my own heart. You'll see why in a minute.
I've frequently written about the pseudoscientific nonsense that goes on at the University of Maryland. Indeed, the University of Maryland School of Medicine is a hotbed of quackademic medicine, including the use of reiki at its world-renowned trauma center along with other forms of quackery. Steve Salzberg is on the faculty at the University of Maryland, and he's not happy:
So what's going on at Maryland's medical school? UMM is home to one of the nation's premier "integrative medicine" programs, which promotes a wide…
oracknows | April 18, 2011I've frequently lamented what might happen if the current trend towards quackademic medicine continues unabated, and quackery is fully "integrated" with science-based medicine. First, there was homeopathic e.r. Then, Mitchell and Webb brought us the British version, namely Homeopathic A&E. What I didn't realize is that predating both of these was...Holistic E.R. (Embedding disabled, unfortunately.)
Favorite bits: The bit about vitamin C, visualization, and crystals. Sadly, with the way academic medicine is being infused with quackery such as energy healing, homeopathy, and even…
oracknows | April 13, 2011Four years ago, I wrote a post that I called Gotta have more woo in my medical school! In it, I discussed how UCSF had put out a woo-ful, non-science-based booklet about "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), full of references to qi, acupuncture, and all manner of woo. Since then I've been sounding the alarm bells about the creeping infiltration of pseudoscience into medical school, even so much that it's becoming part of the mandatory medical school curriculum. Now, four years later, I see that the creeping infiltration has ceased to creep. Rather, it's turned into a torrent of woo…
oracknows | April 12, 2011They call them Necromancers.
Necromancers have an uncanny ability to resurrect an old thread by commenting on it months, even years, after the last comment. Unfortunately, as hard as it is to believe, the version of Movable Type used by Seed to power our blogs does not have a preference panel that allows us to turn off our comments on posts after a set amount of time, for instance three months. Consequently, every so often I"m plagued with Necromancers bringing long deceased comment threads back from the dead to the annoyance of all. Of course, the most annoying Necromancers are the one who…
oracknows | April 11, 2011As many of you probably know, I'm proud to call Dr. Harriet Hall (a.k.a. the SkepDoc) my friend, and, I daresay, so is my wife. We've both hung out with her at the last two TAMs, and we've hit it off pretty well. I also admire her history of standing up for science, reason, and science-based medicine, something she's been doing longer than I have. I can only hope that one day I will reach her level of respect within the skeptical movement. Unfortunately, that will probably never happen until I cease being a Plexiglass box of multicolored blinking lights, but such is the price of pseudonymity…
oracknows | April 8, 2011Yesterday, I wrote about SB 31, a proposed law in North Carolina against which uber-quack Mike Adams had mobilized his "health freedom" minions and a crank organization Citizens for Health Freedom and apparently managed to bring some pressure to bear on legislators to water down the bill. The whole incident reminded me how fragile and easily dismantled even the most rudimentary laws and regulations designed to enforce a science-based standard of care and prevent the proliferation of quacks are. Dr. Rashid Buttar, for instance, can team up with a bunch of "integrative medicine" practitioners…
oracknows | April 7, 2011After having been away for four days, it always takes me a little time to get back into the swing of things when it comes to blogging. Actually, it takes some time to get back into the swing of things at work, too. Sometimes it takes starting on something not too difficult and then working my way back up to the more difficult tasks. In terms of blogging, starting out with something not too difficult often means taking on a reliable source of utter nonsense. And what better source of utter nonsense exists in the world of pseudoscientific medicine? Certainly, it's hard to find a loonier,…
oracknows | April 4, 2011It figures.
I don't know if it's confirmation bias or not, but it seems that every time I go away on a trip, some juicy bit of blog fodder pops up. So, right here, right now, while I'm at the AACR meeting soaking up the latest and greatest in cancer science, inevitably someone posts something that normally would provoke--nay, demand--an Orac-ian deconstruction full of the usual Insolence. So what is it this time?
Dana Ullman.
Yes, everybody's favorite homeopath for whom no science is too settled to twist and homeopathy and homeopathic "thinking" are in fact responsible for much of medical…
oracknows | April 1, 2011
Ah, April Fools' Day!
I had thought of trying to do a typical April Fools' Day post, you know, something like trying to write something but the last time I tried to do that it fell really flat, so flat that I'm not even going to link to it. It's better not to remind my readers of my jokes that fell completely flat. Better to move on to a more appropriate April Fools' Day topic, a topic like the James Randi Educational Foundation's annual Pigasus Awards. The basic idea is to give recognition where recognition is due for the five worst promoters of nonsense from the previous year.
For 2011…
oracknows | March 28, 2011Grant time again! Since today--yes, today!--is the deadline for a rather big grant I'm writing (not quite R01 level, but a respectable three year project if I can get it), I was up until the wee hours of the morning trying to put this sucker to bed. Being the ever-benevolent blogger, though, far be it from me to deny you some Insolence. It'll just have to be recycled Insolence. Not just recycled Insolence, either. Old recycled Insolence, four years old, to be precise! Unbelievable! In fact, it's so old that the links don't even work anymore; so you'll have to take my word for it that I quoted…
oracknows | March 23, 2011As a cancer surgeon, one aspect of the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers that bothers me more than most others is how willingly academia has been to "integrate" quackery with science-based oncology to form the bastard stepchild known as "integrative oncology" that has metastasized to numerous cancer centers that should know better. Metastatic deposits of quackademia have infiltrated the University of Texas-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, UCSF, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and many others. It's quackademic medicine victorious out there; or at least so it seems.
Yet,…
oracknows | March 23, 2011I don't like quackery.
I know, I know. Big surprise, right? After all, I've only spent the last six years laying down a nearly daily dose of Insolence, Respectful and not-so-Respectful, on the anti-vaccine movement, alternative medicine practitioners, quacks, and pseudoscientists of many different stripes. Seeing my fellow human beings fall for unproven or even dangerous remedies leads me to want to try to convince them to pull back and stick with science-based medical therapies. When quackery causes harm, I become even more motivated. Yet there is an area of quackery that I rarely write…
oracknows | March 22, 2011Calling all Texas skeptics! Well, at least Texas skeptics who can find their way to Galveston on March 29. The reason? Well, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston is hosting the Nicholson Round-table Integrative Lecture Series:
"Complementary and integrative medicine in cancer care -- What does the evidence show?" will be presented by Dr. Moshe A. Frenkel, founder of the integrative oncology clinic at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
He will be joined by panelists Dr. Avi B. Markowitz, chief of the division of hematology/oncology and head of the office of oncology clinical trials at…