complementary and alternative medicine
There's a quote attributed to philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer that is much beloved of cranks:
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
I hate this quote with a bloody passion. Actually, that's not quite true. Rather, I find it rather amusing in a pathetic sort of way, first because it's not true. Really, it's not. For instance, in science Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity wasn't exactly "violently opposed," and a lot of other scientific findings that challenge the existing paradigm have…
Judge Orders Surgery For Teen Wrestler: MyFoxPHILLY.com
I have to be honest here. I don't know for sure what I think of the latest developments in the Mazeratti Mitchell case.
As you may recall from a couple of days ago, Mazeratti Mitchell is a 16 year old wrestler in Philadelphia who suffered a spinal cord injury while wrestling. Fortunately, given his subsequent course in which he has been recovering function, it was clearly not a complete transection of the spinal cord, but it was severe. His doctors recommended surgery to stabilize his spine and allow his injured spinal cord to heal.…
Things are pretty hairy this week, what with a couple of grant deadlines fast approaching, not to mention a rather important site visit at my institution later this week. As a result, I had been intending to post a "rerun" today, but then I saw something that just cracked me up so much that I couldn't resist taking a few minutes to do an uncharacteristically brief (for me) post about it.
Earlier this week, there was an announcement of a blockbuster deal in which AOL is buying that wretched hive of scum and quackery (take that, Dean Toney!), The Huffington Post, for $315 million. Since then,…
If there's one thing that gets my blood boiling almost above all else when it comes to quackery, it's when parents subject children to it. The result has been copious blogging about cases, such as that of Daniel Hauser, Katie Wernecke, and Abraham Cherrix, all of whom refused chemotherapy for treatable cancers. I've also discussed Madeline Neumann, a 12-year-old girl whose parents, based on their religion, allowed her to die of diabetic ketoacidosis rather than save her life by allowing physicians to administer insulin and fluids. They thought prayer would save her. It didn't.
The following…
Remember Medical Voices?
It's a group that I first discovered a year and a half ago that represented itself as a group of physicians and medical professionals who wanted to produce the "most comprehensive educational center on the Internet for physicians seeking the truth about vaccines." Of course, it didn't take me long to realize that MV was packed to the gills with the usual characters, antivaccine loons all, people such as Sherri Tenpenny, DO; Mayer Eisenstein, MD, JD, MPH; Harold Buttram, MD; and Leo Rebello, MD, ND, PhD. So copious were the utter nonsense, pseudoscience, misinformation…
Yesterday, I concluded that Dr. Mehmet Oz's journey to the Dark Side was continuing apace. After all, he had pulled the classic "bait and switch" of "alternative" medicine by allowing a man who calls himself Yogi Cameron to use his television show to co-opt the perfectly science-based modalities of diet and exercise as being somehow "alternative." Like all good promoters of woo, whether you call it "alternative" medicine, "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), or "integrative medicine" (IM), Yogi Cameron used diet and exercise as the thin edge of the wedge, behind which followed…
As I sat down to write this, I was torn. What topic to deconstruct? There appear to be so many! Certainly, the latest Huffington Post excretion by the ever-clueless (but amusing in his cluelessness, which results in posts of pure hilarity) Dana Ullman, entitled Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize Winner, Takes Homeopathy Seriously sure looked tempting. Ullman always makes an amusing target. However, I realized that I had already discussed Montagnier, not just once but twice in the last couple of months, first for promoting autism quackery and then, more recently, for having fallen hard for homeopathy…
Sometimes a comment in the comment thread after one of my posts ends up turning into the inspiration for another post. This is especially likely to happen if I respond to that comment and end up writing a comment of myself that seems way too good to waste, forever buried in the comments where, as soon as the commenting on the post dies down, it remains, unread again. So it was after my post on the "integration" of quackery into academic medical centers. In that post, I applied some of my inimitable not-so-Respectful Insolence to a deal between Georgetown University, what should be a bastion…
If there's a single TV show out there that has the widest reach when it abuses science-based medicine, there is no doubt that it's Oprah Winfrey's show. If there's a show that has the second-widest reach when it abuses science-based medicine, arguably it's Dr. Mehmet Oz's show. Whether it be his recent show featuring quackmaster supreme, Joseph Mercola, or his upcoming show featuring a faith healer, I fear that Dr. Oz has given up whatever claim he once had to promoting science-based medicine. Yes, it's true that he has had a soft spot for reiki for a long time, but other than that he's…
Beginning not long after this blog began, one recurring theme has been the infiltration of "quackademic medicine" into academic medical centers. Whether it be called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM), its infiltration into various academic medical centers has been one of the more alarming developments I've noted over the last several years. The reason is that "integrative" medicine is all too often in reality nothing more than "integrating" pseudoscience with science, quackery with medicine. After all, when you "integrate" something like reiki or…
I've on occasion been asked why I even bother responding to the brain--and I do use the term loosely--droppings of Mike Adams, the purveyor of one of the largest repositories of quackery on the entire Internet. Good question. Sometimes I wonder that myself. After all, Adams is so far out there, so beyond the realm of rational thought, so full of bizarre conspiracy theories and defenses of quackery that anyone the least bit rational and science-based should be able to see through his nonsense. Applying a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence to someone as reality-challenged as Mike…
Most of the woo I write about, fortunately, I don't have to deal with directly close to home. This is a good thing indeed, because it means that where I practice is blissfully free (for the most part) of pseudoscience. Unfortunately, earlier this year, I was in for an unpleasant surprise when I found out that there was going to be a showing of a rather annoying movie. It also occurred to me that I had never, to my memory, discussed the topic of this movie, namely the health claims of raw ("living") food veganism. The vitalism at the heart of this movie and its accompanying "educational" DVD…
Over the last three weeks, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been publishing a multipart expose by investigative journalist Brian Deer that enumerated in detail the specifics of how a British gastroenterologist turned hero of the anti-vaccine movement had committed scientific fraud by falsifying key aspects of case reports that he used as the basis of his now infamous 1998 Lancet article suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and a syndrome consisting of regressive autism and enterocolitis. Indeed, Deer even went so far as to describe Wakefield's fraud as "Piltdown medicine,"…
Stick a fork in Dr. Oz. He's done.
I know I've been highly critical of Dr. Mehmet Oz, Vice Chair of the Department of Surgery at Columbia University and medical director of the Integrative Medicine Program (i.e., Columbia's quackademic medicine) program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Those are his academic titles. More important, in terms of his promotion of pseudoscience, is his role as daytime medical show host. Dr. Oz's television show, called, appropriately enough, The Dr. Oz Show, is a direct result of his having been featured on Oprah Winfrey's show on numerous occasions as one of…
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
I realize I say these things again and again and again, but they bear repeating because together they are a message that needs to be spread in as clear and unambiguous a form as possible. First, whenever you hear someone say, "I'm not anti-vaccine," there's always a "but" after it, and that "but" almost always demonstrates that the person is anti-vaccine after all. Second, for antivaccine loons, it's always about the vaccines. Always. It's not primarily about autism advocacy; it's primarily about the vaccines and blaming them for…
Something amazing happened on Friday. Unfortunately, I didn't get to blog it as soon as I would have liked because (1) it happened on Canadian TV and the video wasn't available to anyone outside of Canada until it showed up on YouTube and (2) Craig Willougby's changing his mind about Andrew Wakefield really did gobsmack me to the point that I had to blog about it, so rare is it for someone who used to accept pseudoscience to have the courage and intellectual honesty to admit publicly that he is changing his mind. Still, even though it's three days later, I didn't want to let this pass,…
I'm tired.
Well, not exactly. I think I'm just suffering a case of what I like to call "anti-vax burnout." It's been a busy couple of weeks on the antivaccine front, given the new set of revelations about Andrew Wakefield, including even more detail about the nature of the scientific fraud he committed and previously untold information regarding just how extensive his business plans were to profit from the MMR scare that his fraudulent science was instrumental in launching in the U.K. Regular readers know that, from time to time, when the news about the anti-vaccine movement is coming fast…
One of the favorite attacks favored by advocates of pseudoscience, particularly advocates of the sort of pseudoscience favored by proponents of "alternative" medicine, particularly the more militant ones who really, really detest conventional, science-based medicine, is to poison the well with a pre-emptive ad hominem attack that implies that defenders of science-based medicine are somehow interested in nothing but money. The first favored attack is to point out that the pharmaceutical industry is interested in nothing but money. That's partially true (they are, after all, for profit…
Remember how early this morning I posted about Mike Adam's despicable and ghoulish attempt to seize on the tragedy of the shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) by Jared Lee Loughner as a way of blaming the pharmaceutical industry and government for his violent rampage and intentionally conflating the decrying of violent rhetoric that might have helped to inspire a probably mentally ill individual to commit an act of mass murder? At the time, I observed that, whenever I think that Mike Adams has gone as low as he can go, he always manages to prove me wrong and go even lower…
If my post today is a bit shorter on the usual Respectfully and not-so-Respectfully Insolent verbiage that you've come to know and love (or hate), I hope you'll forgive me. It's hard not to sit back, rest a bit, and enjoy the spectacle of Andrew Wakefield being pilloried in the press in the wake of the BMJ's article documenting his scientific misconduct in gory detail. He's gotten away far too long with trying to split the difference when credulous journalists "tell both sides of the story" so that to those not knowledgeable about his scientific fraud and incompetence it seems as though there…