complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | June 30, 2010ORAC SAYS: Please note my disclaimer.
After the events of last week, I'm a bit sensitive when it comes to matters like the one I'm about to discuss. Having the anti-vaccine cranks over at the Age of Autism weblog trying to get me fired over my blogging has a tendency to do that to me. (The details are out there if you haven't heard of it; I will say nothing more of it here.) In any case, if there's anything the events of last week drove home to me, it's that a sina qua non of anti-science cranks like the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement is that, when faced with serious scientific…
oracknows | June 29, 2010I wish it were otherwise, but not all that many reporters "get it" when it comes to science and quackery. Fortunately, Chicago Tribune reporter Trine Tsouderos does. She's shown it multiple times over the last year with stories about the autism "biomed" movement and Boyd Haley's trying to pass off an industrial chelator as a dietary supplement.
It just so happens that she's going to be taking part in a live web chat Thursday, July 1, at noon CDT (that's Chicago time). The topic is going to be alternative treatments for autism, pegged to her story last week about OSR#1 and Haley. The chat will…
oracknows | June 29, 2010With the aging of the population, one of the most feared potential manners by which more and more of us will leave this earth is through Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. And it is a scary thing, too. Having valued my intelligence all my life and in particular enjoying the intellectual stimulation that I derive from my job, not to mention from blogging and contemplating science outside my realm of expertise, like many people I fear Alzheimer's disease at least as much as cancer or heart disease, possibly more. Imagining the slow decline in my faculties to the point where I can…
oracknows | June 28, 2010I really hate this.
I really hate having to take a friend to task, but he leaves me little choice. You see, I actually like Chris Mooney. Back in the day, I even even hoisted a pint with him at the Toledo Lounge in D.C., round about the time of the commencement of the whole "framing" kerfuffle that has periodically flared up to engulf ScienceBlogs and the rest of the science blogosphere. We had great fun making fun of everyone's favorite creationist neurosurgeon, particularly his claim that the "design inference" has been "of great value" to medicine and has been a great boon to medical…
oracknows | June 24, 2010Remember Boyd Haley?
He's the Professor and former Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky whose formerly respectable career tanked because he fell into pseudoscience. For whatever reason, a while back he became enamored first of dental amalgam quackery to the point where he became involved in organizations like Consumers for Dental Choice (a.k.a. "Toxic Teeth"), whose expressed raison d'etre is to "work to abolish mercury dental fillings"). From that position, he promoted the idea that mercury-containing dental amalgams are horrifically toxic, helping to spread…
oracknows | June 22, 2010(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer. Also note that, when it was publicized on the Internet and on the blogosphere that Tinkham's cancer gave every indication of having recurred and she was dying, her "practitioner" Robert O. Young removed the videos embedded below from YouTube.)
Remember Kim Tinkham?
She's the woman who was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer about three years ago. At the time, she became infamous because she showed up on Oprah Winfrey's show, back when Oprah was in her "Secret" phase and proceeded to alarm…
oracknows | June 18, 2010In the wake of President Obama's election, there was a great deal of hope that he would take science-based medicine seriously and, as he promised in his inaugural speech, "restore science to its rightful place." Shortly before Obama's inauguration, in fact, Steve Salzberg proposed that the Obama administration should defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).
NCCAM, as you may recall, is a center in the National Institutes of Health largely dedicated to funding pseudoscience. True, there is some legitimate research mixed in with the pseudoscience, but it's…
oracknows | June 17, 2010If there's one thing that the loons over at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism might actually be somewhat good at, it's leaping on a news story and trying to liken it to their unshakable pseudoscientific belief that vaccines cause autism. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for our our amusement), the merry band of anti-vaccine activists over there is so utterly, irredeemably bad at constructing a coherent and logical metaphor that whenever they try the result comes out something like these two posts:
If President Obama Had Been Talking About the Autism "Spill"
Olmsted on Autism…
oracknows | June 10, 2010Let's see. Now that I'm back from Chicago, having recently attended a major cancer meeting, not to mention having already blogged about the meeting, what to do next? Sure, the whole thing about Andrew Wakefield finding himself just one step away from appearing on Jeff Rense's or Alex Jones's radio show was amusing in the extreme to me, and no doubt there will be much more blogging material to mine in that vein, but if you really want to bring home the crazy there's only one place shy of Whale.to to visit.
That's right, I'm talking about that wretched hive of medical scum and villainy, Mike…
oracknows | June 9, 2010Thanks to my "friends" at Generation Rescue and Age of Autism, I've learned of something that is so absolutely appropriate, so perfect in its complete perfection (if you know what I mean), it brought a smile to my face. It turns out that anti-vaccine hero and martyr Andrew Wakefield, who has been so disgraced that he's left speaking at pathetic anti-vaccine rallies with even more pathetic sing-alongs with anti-vaccine music (if you can call it that), is being interviewed again, and the venue could not be more of a perfect match for "Dr. Andy's" unique skill set and place in the anti-vaccine…
oracknows | June 4, 2010Since its very inception five years ago, The Huffington Post has been, to steal a phrase from Star Wars, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, at least when it comes to anything resembling medicine. Of course, that's the problem. Very little, if anything, published in HuffPo resembles actual science-based medicine. The vast majority of medicine published there consists either of anti-vaccine screeds that are beyond stupid, quantum woo courtesy of Deepak Chopra, or pure, dangerous quackery, such as advocating homeopathy for H1N1 and acid-base woo for cancer. It's so bad that on more than one…
oracknows | June 1, 2010Of all the "alternative" therapies out there, arguably the most studied is the modality known as acupuncture. Perhaps the reason is that, unlike homeopathy, which based on physics, chemistry, and biology alone is so implausible that, for it to "work," huge swaths of well-established physics and chemistry would have to be shown to be not just wrong but extravagantly and outrageously wrong (making homeopathy far more akin to magic than science), or reiki, which, when you come right down to it, is nothing more than faith healing based on Eastern mysticism rather than Christianity, acupuncture…
oracknows | May 27, 2010I don't mean to beat up on Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick. I really don't. I realize I rather harshly criticized him yesterday for being so hostile to the concept of "denialism," to the point where he characterized even the use of the term as a means of "suppressing" free speech. Normally, that criticism would have been enough. If Dr. Fitzpatrick answered, that would be all well and good; if he didn't, I'd move on and forget about it. Unfortunately, I was made aware of another article he published at his usual gig at Spiked Online entitled Censorship is not the answer to health scares.
Damn if it…
oracknows | May 26, 2010I've had a lot of fun thus far this week expressing more than a bit of schadenfreude over Andrew Wakefield's being ignominiously stripped of his medical license in the U.K. by the General Medical Council, not to mention pointing out the quackfest that is Autism One, I feel the need for a brief break from the anti-vaccine craziness. This is as good a time as any to take care of some leftover business from last week that I had planned on writing about but gotten distracted by all the deliciously bad news for the anti-vaccine movement. Besides, what will be going on in Grant Park in Chicago this…
oracknows | May 25, 2010It figures.
I've written a couple of times about a rally to be held tomorrow in Grant Park that would be hilarious were it not an indication of the threat to public health that the anti-vaccine movement represents. Actually, it is to some extent hilarious, mainly due to the anti-vaccine Poe-worthy "music" that will be the featured entertainment.
It was bad enough that the fair city of Chicago would be blighted with this nonsense--and Andrew Wakefield, too--but now the "American Rally for Personal Rights" (a.k.a. the Autism One anti-vaccine rally featuring disgraced and unethical British…
oracknows | May 21, 2010Yesterday's post made me sad. It always makes me sad to contemplate a 14 year old boy facing the loss of his father to an aggressive form of leukemia, as Danny Hauser is. The kid just can't catch a break. First he himself develops Hodgkin's lymphoma. Because he happens to live in a family that has taken up a faux "Native American" religion that claims its "natural healing" is better than chemotherapy, he resists undergoing treatment, and his family supports him. After a judge orders him to undergo chemotherapy, Danny and his mom then take off on the lam from the law, heading for Mexico and…
oracknows | May 20, 2010Around this time last year, the major topic of this blog was the case of a young teen named Daniel Hauser. In fact, right around this time last year, this particular case was approaching its climax. Hauser, as you may recall, was the 13-year-old Minnesota boy diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma who refused chemotherapy. His stated reason was his religion, namely Nemenhah, a fake American Indian religion that his parents joined 18 years ago. However, I had my doubts that religion was the main reason why Hauser was refusing chemotherapy and his mother was supporting his decision to pursue "…
oracknows | May 14, 2010
"I don't want knowledge. I want certainty!"
--David Bowie, from Law (Earthlings on Fire)
If there's one universal trait among humans, it seems to be an unquenchable thirst for certainty. This should come as no surprise to those committed to science and rational thinking because there is a profound conflict between our human desire for certainty and the uncertainty of scientific knowledge. The reason is that the conclusions of science are always provisional. They are always subject to change based on new evidence. Although by no means the only reason, clearly this craving for certainty the…
oracknows | May 9, 2010Discuss!
A most appropriate analogy! But if Gary Null is the Kent Hovind of alternative medicine, then what does that make Mike Adams?
oracknows | May 7, 2010You know, if there's one question I've always had about homeopathy, it's the one asked by Viktor Poór below:
(Click for full comic.)
Certainly the cost of materials for homeopathic remedies is lower than just about any other product that I can imagine.