complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | December 2, 2016Back in the day, I used to write posts with titles like When the outbreaks occur, they’ll start in California. I even wrote a followup, When the outbreaks occur, they’ll start in California, 2014 edition. The reason, of course, was that California was one of the epicenters of vaccine hesitancy as well as the home to some high profile antivaccine-sympathetic physicians, such as Dr. Bob Sears (who’s known for making Holocaust analogies about bills tightening school vaccine mandate requirements) and Dr. Jay Gordon (who’s known for continuing to claim, against all evidence, that vaccines cause…
oracknows | November 30, 2016A week and a half ago, a conference was held at the NYU Langone Medical Center, Confronting Vaccine Resistance: Strategies for Success. It featured speakers and panelists whom I admire quite a bit, including Paul Offit, the man who is to antivaccine loons Satan, Darth Vader, Voldemort, and Sauron all rolled up into one. Also featured were Richard Pan, the California state senator who co-sponsored SB 277, which passed and is now a law that bans nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates; bioethicist Arthur Caplan, a strong advocate for vaccines; Dorit Reiss, a law school professor and…
oracknows | November 29, 2016I’m always hesitant to write about matters that are more political than scientific or medical, although sometimes the sorts of topics that I blog about inevitably require it (e.g., the 21st Century Cures Act, an act that buys into the myth that to bring "cures" to patients faster we have to neuter the FDA and a retooled version of which is still being considered). This is one of those times. Yesterday, I woke up to the news that President-Elect Donald Trump had chosen Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) as his new Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS),…
oracknows | November 28, 2016I don’t have many “rules” per se about blogging, but one informal rule that I do live by is that I never blog about a study if all I can access is the abstract. In general, I insist on having the complete study before I will blog it, because to me the abstract isn’t enough. Basically, if I’m going to blog a study, I generally want to do it right and be able to read the whole paper, because that’s the only way to properly analyze a paper. I find this rule particularly important when analyzing the latest bit of antivaccine pseudoscience, especially because most antivaccine activists don’t go…
oracknows | November 27, 2016It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered Glenn Sabin. You might remember him, though. He runs a consulting firm, FON Therapeutics, which is dedicated to the promotion of “integrative” health, or, as I like to put it, the “integration of pseudoscience and quackery with science-based medicine. What I remember most about Sabin is how he once proclaimed that “integrative medicine” was a brand, not a specialty. Unfortunately, he was correct in his assessment. Basically, he declared, “CAM [complementary and alternative medicine] is dead. The evolution of evidence-based, personalized integrative…
oracknows | November 25, 2016This post is a bit later than usual, but there’s a good reason for it. Last night, I was in full food coma, having consumed the traditional Thanksgiving feast, along with a fair amount of wine. Besides, even a sometimes arrogant bloviator like myself, who uses a pseudonym based on a fictional, near-all-knowing supercomputer from a 35-year-old British cult science fiction series needs a break now and then.
So today I’ll be, for the most part, slumming a bit today as I recover. What better place to look for material when you’re not interested in exerting yourself too hard than the antivaccine…
oracknows | November 23, 2016Back in the day, Deepak Chopra used to be a frequent topic of this blog. He still pops up from time to time, such as when irony meters everywhere immediately self-destructed after Chopra criticized Donald Trump for being insufficiently evidence-based or when, after I wrote a post asking why medical conferences keep inviting Chopra to speak, Chopra was so displeased that he actually posted a video attacking me (and other skeptics who’ve criticized his pseudoscience). Unfortunately, Chopra truly is one of the most influential people in “integrative medicine” today. To be honest, I’ve never…
oracknows | November 21, 2016One of the great things about America has been the First Amendment, particularly the right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. These are rights allow us to gather together to protest when we see something that we don’t think is right and want to change. Unfortunately, there is one downside to these freedoms, and that is that cranks, quacks, and outright twits have just as much right to free speech as anyone. Fortunately, my right to free speech allows me to ridicule these twits for annoying people, endangering public health, and in general making publicly making idiots of themselves…
oracknows | November 17, 2016I’ve frequently written about what I like to refer to as “quackademic medicine,” defined as the infiltration of outright quackery into medical academia, particularly medical schools and academic medical centers. There’s no doubt that it’s a significant problem as hallowed institutions like Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center embrace nonsense, pseudoscience, and quackery in the name of “integrative medicine.” It goes far beyond MSKCC, however, with Dana-Farber and other elite institutions having apparently bought into the need to study prescientific vitalistic quackery.
One area that’s…
oracknows | November 15, 2016Whenever I write about homeopathy, I almost always refer to it at least once as “The One Quackery To Rule Them All.” It’s a phrase I’ve used to describe homeopathy for several years now, and for good reason. Of all the quackery out there, with the possible exception of reiki, homeopathy is the one that is most obviously quackery. Its two main “Laws” are so clearly pseudoscience that you’d think it incredibly unlikely that anyone would fall for such nonsense, but fall for it they do.
I’ll briefly show you what I mean. That I can do so this briefly should show those unfamiliar with homeopathy…
oracknows | November 14, 2016The Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) doesn’t like me much. I understand. I haven’t exactly been supportive of the group’s mission or activities. So it wasn’t surprising that SIO wrote letters trying to rebut a Perspectives article on “integrative oncology” that I published in Nature Reviews Cancer two years ago. What depressed me about that encounter was that one of the complaints the SIO had about my article was that it spent too much verbiage discussing homeopathy as one pseudoscientific treatment that “integrative” oncology “integrates” with science-based medicine and no one uses…
oracknows | November 13, 2016John Weeks has long been an activist for alternative medicine—excuse me, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, as it’s more commonly referred to these days, “integrative medicine.” Despite his having zero background in scientific research or the design and execution of experiments and clinical trials, for some bizarre reason in May he was appointed editor of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (JACM). It didn’t take him long at all to use his new post to launch a nasty broadside against CAM critics in general (such as yours truly) and those who criticized a…
oracknows | November 11, 2016If you’re a skeptic dedicated to promoting science and reason, these are scary times. My country, the United States of America, just unexpectedly elected a racist, misogynistic, conspiracy-mongering, scientific ignoramus (who, by the way, is rabidly antivaccine) as its next President thanks to the political relic known as the Electoral College. In actuality, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by close to 350,000 votes at the last tally I checked this morning, but now, as in 2000, thanks to the Electoral College, the candidate with the most popular votes is not President-Elect. Hillary…
oracknows | November 10, 2016Well, I’m back.
Yes, late last night, I re-entered returned home from vacation in Mexico before our new President-Elect has a chance to build his wall. I was so exhausted that I had no time to write anything and remain so. At least I wasn’t stupid enough to go back to work today and instead took the whole week off. Like most of you, I’m still processing he cluster—oh, wait, no major profanity here—that was the US election, whose results definitely put a damper on the trip home.
In particular, I fear for what the new administration will do to science in this country, and might write about that…
oracknows | November 9, 2016Yesterday, I wrote about alternative medicine clinics in Germany that offer a combination of alternative cancer cures plus experimental therapeutics administered improperly outside the auspices of a clinical trial. In particular, I discussed two cases. The first was British actress Leah Bracknell, who is raising money to go to one of these alternative cancer clinics to treat her stage IV lung cancer. the second was a British woman named Pauline Gahan, who was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer and has thus far spent £300,000 for a combination of vitamin infusions, “detox,” and Keytruda…
oracknows | November 8, 2016A couple of months ago, I discussed patient deaths at an alternative medicine clinic in Europe, where a naturopath named Klaus Ross had been administering an experimental cancer drug (3-bromopyruvate, or 3-BP) to patients outside the auspices of a clinical trial. 3-BP is a drug that targets the Warburg effect, a characteristic of cancer cells first reported in the 1920s by Otto Warburg in which the cancer cell changes its metabolism to shut off oxidative phosphorylation (the part of glucose metabolism requiring oxygen that produces the most energy) to rely almost exclusively on glycolysis and…
oracknows | November 6, 2016Orac is currently hiding from the Federation in an undisclosed location (somewhere warm and out of the country, the better to avoid election news after having cast an absentee ballot), where he is charging his Tarial cells, the better to return fully recharged and ready to dive back into the massive piles of woo awaiting him when he returns. Since it’s only a brief respite, I had been planning on either reposting material from Orac’s other known hideout on the web, the better not to let this blog lie fallow and lack for Insolence, Respectful and not-so-Respectful, as indicated depending upon…
oracknows | November 4, 2016That I’m not a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH, formerly known as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or NCCAM) should come as no surprise to anyone. Basically, from its very inception as the Office of Alternative Medicine in the early 1990s to its growth to large center with a yearly budget of $120+ million, NCCIH has served one purpose: The promotion and attempted legitimization of quackery and magical thinking in medicine, the better to “integrate” pseudoscientific medicine with science-based medicine. Certainly, the…
oracknows | November 3, 2016Way, way back in the day, before I took an interest in pseudoscientific medical claims, I knew who Deepak Chopra was. Back then, though, like most doctors, I didn’t pay much attention to him and didn’t know much about him other than that he was some sort of alternative medicine guru, a physician who had embraced Ayurvedic medicine and blathered about “quantum” consciousness. It didn’t take long once I embraced skepticism to run face-first into the utter woo that s Deepak Chopra’s message, in part thanks to other skeptical bloggers introducing me to his woo. Indeed, back in the early days of…
oracknows | November 1, 2016As I write this, the 2016 Election is lurching painfully to its conclusion, with about a week to go. In my entire adult life, dating back to when I first reached the age where I started paying attention to politics in the late 1970s, I cannot remember a more bizarre or painful election, nor can I remember an election in which one possible outcome actually terrifies me. I’m referring to the possibility of Donald Trump becoming our next President. I’ve made no secret of my contempt for his xenophobia, his blatant sexism and misogyny, his change from using racist dog whistles to racist bullhorns…