complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | April 9, 2010Is chiropractic woo?
I'm often asked that question, and my answer has usually been something along the lines of, "It depends on what it is used for." Of course, there's no doubt that the "theory" behind chiropractic, namely that so-called "subluxations" of the spine are the source of nearly all disease, is a load of the purest woo. After all, going back to the origin of chiropractic in 1895, you will recall that Daniel David Palmer essentially made up chiropractic out of whole cloth when he claimed to have restored the hearing of a deaf janitor by "adjusting" a bump on his spine. As a result…
oracknows | April 7, 2010One advantage of blogging is that I can sometimes tap into the knowledge of my readers to help me out. Some of you may recall a little something I created a couple of years ago known as the Academic Woo Aggregator. Basically, it was a list of medical schools and academic medical centers in the U.S. and Canada with departments or divisions of "integrative medicine" that promote what has been termed "quackademic medicine."
Unfortunately, I've been very remiss in updating it. The last update was in May 2008. I think it's long past due for an update. I haven't decided whether I will post such an…
oracknows | April 7, 2010Beware, North Carolina. Beware. Your law has become quack-friendly to the point where doctors can do almost anything.
Why, you may reasonably wonder, am I saying this? The answer is what appears to be the end of a long and painful story of cancer quackery and anti-vaccine celebrity that has tainted North Carolina for years now. Do you remember Dr. Rashid Buttar? Regular readers know who he is, as he's been a recurring character on this blog since the very beginning. Most recently, he figured prominently in the case of Desiree Jennings, the young woman who claimed that the flu vaccine caused a…
oracknows | April 6, 2010Since a whole bunch of you have been sending me this and posting it in my comments, I don't see how I can avoid mentioning it. Apparently it's being reported on The Superficial, Celebitchy, and People.com that Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy have broken up. I must admit that it's hard not to feel a bit of schadenfreude over this and wonder if maybe Jim Carrey was getting tired of the whole anti-vaccine scene, as The Superficial suggested:
I can only assume this has everything to do with Jenny McCarthy being completely shot down by the medical community only to continuing claiming a Playboy…
oracknows | April 6, 2010He's baa-aack.
You knew he couldn't stay gone for long, I'm sure. He's just like the zombie who rises again just as the hero turns his back, thinking the zombie dead, or the blond terrorist in Die Hard who appeared to have met his end hanging from a chain only to appear later in the movie, just when it looks as though it's all over and Bruce Willis has triumphed, to try to take a shot at him. That's right. I'm referring to the anti-vaccine quack whose trial lawyer-funded, incompetent, and probably fraudulent research launched a thousand autism quacks looking to "cure" autism "vaccine injury…
oracknows | April 4, 2010Remember John Benneth? He's a homeopath who runs a website called The Science of Homeopathy and produced a woo-tastic video claiming to show us how homeopathy works. Steve Novella also took on his video. For his trouble, he was rewarded with one of the most hilariously off-base attacks I've ever seen, even from anti-vaccine loons. So full of awesome looniness was the video that it induced in me a distinct sense of envy. After all, all I have is J.B. Handley attacking me.
Now, for reasons that elude me, Mr. Benneth has produced a second video. It's just as outrageous. In fact, it's even more…
oracknows | April 1, 2010I was wrong.
I know it doesn't happen that often, but I'm forced to admit it. I was wrong. I predicted that Simon Singh would likely lose his appeal against an astonishing illiberal ruling on his libel case by Sir David Eady. Singh, as you may recall, is the British science writer who wrote a now infamous article about chiropractic, in particular, Singh labeled claims that chiropractic could treat colic, sleeping and feeding problems, ear infections, asthma, and prolonged crying as "bogus." Specifically, he wrote that the British Chiropractic Association "happily promotes bogus therapies."…
oracknows | March 30, 2010I hate to write about that woo-meister supreme Mike Adams more than one time in a week. For one thing, his website, NaturalNews.com, is a font of pseudoscience and quackery rivaling the infamous Whale.to, which makes it powerfully seductive to go back to that well again and again for blogging material. Although taking on an Adams screed is almost always a lot of fun for me, it's also too easy. Mike's craziness is so strong that, while it almost guarantees an entertaining piece for my blog, going back to that well too often risks making me fat and lazy as a skeptic and potentially boring you.…
oracknows | March 26, 2010I have an MD and a PhD. While many people find that to be impressive, personally I've become so inured of it that I certainly don't take note of it much anymore. Certainly, I rarely point it out. So, you may ask, why am I pointing it out this time, even going so far as to start a post with it? The answer is simple. If there was one thing I always thought about having both an MD and a PhD, it's that it should render one more resistant to pseudoscience and woo. I know, I know, maybe I'm being incredibly arrogant or incredibly naive--possibly both--but it was what I thought for a long time, even…
oracknows | March 25, 2010I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm not really a political blogger. True, I do from time to time succumb to the blogger's temptation of being a pundit on current events or pontificating on politics, but in general I don't do that very often because political bloggers are a dime a dozen and politics isn't my area of strength. Writing about science and science-based medicine is. That's part of the reason why I really haven't said much about the massive health care reform bill that was passed on Sunday or the political process, except when on occasion the utter insanity of it all (…
oracknows | March 22, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in November 2007 and be assured that I'll be back tomorrow. Remember, if you've been reading less than two and a half years, it's new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than two and a half years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged.
I wish I had thought of this one, but I didn't. However, I never let a little thing like not having thought of…
oracknows | March 19, 2010I'm envious of Steve Novella.
No, the reason isn't his vastly greater influence in the skeptical community than mine, his podcast The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, or the fact that he gets called a lot more for commentary when something involving quackery versus science-based medicine comes up. He's earned that, having been at this a lot longer than me and under his own name. No, what irritates me is that he somehow manages to get homeopaths to make videos like this trashing him:
"Homeopathy: The persecuted Jew of modern Nazi fascist medicine"? Isn't "Nazi fascist" a bit redundant? Maybe…
oracknows | March 18, 2010It's been a while since I wrote about this topic, but I fear for the future of medicine.
Regular readers know what I'm talking about. The infiltration of various unscientific, pseudoscientific, and even anti-scientific "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) modalities into academic medicine seems increasingly to be endangering science-based medicine. Worse, this infiltration of quackery seems at least as bad, if not worse, in academic medicine, so much so that Dr. R.W. coined a most exquisite term for the increasing prevalence of pseudoscience in medical academia: Quackademic medicine…
oracknows | March 17, 2010Kent Heckenlively shows us why AoA is "not anti-vaccine":
Bruesewitz v. Wyeth has the potential to move all that in a new direction. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act simply states, "No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable . . . if the injury or death resulted from side-effect that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings."
What does that mean in plain English? The example I've always heard used in reference to such a standard is dynamite. Now we all know what dynamite does. It blows up. So, if you light…
oracknows | March 17, 2010
It's rare that I encounter a bit of nonsense that allows me to deploy two of my favorite rhetorical devices. First, it lets me pull out one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies, in which the immortal line, "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" was first uttered. Second, it lets me repeat once again yet another variation of Inigo Montoya's immortal words. It's a two-fer! Not surprisingly, it's courtesy of the anti-vaccine crank blog we've all come to know and love (well, I love it because it has provided me such a target-rich environment for taking on quackery and woo, although I…
oracknows | March 16, 2010I realize that I've said many times before that there is no such thing as "alternative" medicine. There is medicine that has been shown to work through science, medicine that has not yet been shown to work, and medicine that has been shown not to work. "Alternative" medicine that is shown to work through science ceases to be "alternative" and becomes simply medicine.
There are times when I think I might need to change that opinion.
Well, not exactly. However, promoters of various forms of alternative medicine, stymied when they try to show that their woo works through science, seem to think…
oracknows | March 14, 2010Of course, the best way to decide such questions is to vote, right?
I know, I know, I've complained about poll-crashing before, but, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
oracknows | March 12, 2010My first big splash in the blogosphere will have occurred five years ago in June, when I first discovered the utter wingnuttery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It was then that I wrote a little bit of that not-so-Respectful Insolence that you've come to know and love entitled Salon.com flushes its credibility down the toilet, a perfect description of an article by RFK, Jr. published in Salon.com and simultaneously in Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. As I look back, I realize that, as widely linked to and discussed as it was at the time, that post, arguably more than any other, was the…
oracknows | March 11, 2010These days, I'm having a love-hate relationship with Elsevier. On the one hand, there are lots of reasons to hate Elsevier. For example, Elsevier took payments from Merck, Sharp & Dohme in order to publish in essence a fake journal designed to promote its products, and then got caught doing it again. On the other hand, Elsevier owns both The Lancet and NeuroToxicology. The former recently retracted Andrew Wakefield's original 1998 Lancet paper that launched the latest iteration of the anti-vaccine movement in the U.K., as well as a thousand quacks, to be followed by the latter, which…
oracknows | March 10, 2010Well, that didn't take long.
Remember when the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, decided that she would try to harass, intimidate, and silence Paul Offit through the filing of a frivolous libel suit against Dr. Offit, Amy Wallace (the journalist who interviewed Offit for an excellent article last year), and Condé Nast, the publisher of WIRED, which ran the article? Well, the judge has ruled, and that ruling is...dismissed!
The text of the ruling can be found here.
There are some awesomely awesome passages in this ruling, which is a slapdown that, while not as epic…