complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | October 19, 2009Many have been the times over the last five years that I've called out bad journalism about medicine in general and vaccines in particular, especially the coverage of the discredited notion that vaccines or mercury in vaccines somehow was responsible for the "autism epidemic." That's why I feel a special responsibility to highlight good reporting on the issue. Indeed, reporting on this issue is so uniformly awful that when I see something this good, I want to do everything in my power to hawk the hell out of it. So, I want you to read this article in the November issue of WIRED Magazine…
oracknows | October 19, 2009Every so often, as the health care reform initiative spearheaded by the Obama Administration wends its way through Congress (or, more precisely, wend their ways through Congress, given that there are multiple bills coming from multiple committees in both Houses), I've warned about various chicanery from woo-friendly legislators trying to legitimize by legislation where they've failed by science various "alternative" medicine practices. This began much earlier this year, when I pointed out how Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) invited the Four Horsemen of the Woo-pocalypse to the Senate to testify.…
From one skeptic to the 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award: Stop being an anti-vaccine loon
oracknows | October 16, 2009Well, here's something refreshing. In fact, it's so refreshing that I just had to link to it. Michael Shermer, renowned skeptic and the publisher of Skeptic, has decided to school the Atheist Alliance International 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine kook Bill Maher, over the nonsense about alternative medicine, vaccines, and conspiracy theories about big pharma that Maher regularly likes to lay down.
Even better, he did it on what is normally a repository of anti-vaccine pseudoscience, The Huffington Post, in the form of An Open Letter to Bill Maher on Vaccinations.…
oracknows | October 16, 2009I'm back.
If there's one thing I've noticed in the nearly five years that I've been doing this blog thing, it's that getting started again after taking even a few days off is hard. There's a bit of paralysis that sets in. I get used to not having to think about what I want to write, and often there are a number of things that I almost certainly would have written about. Fortunately, for at least one of them, PalMD took care of it it for me. Otherwise, the blogger whose post he deconstructed would have tasted a bit of the ol' not-so-Respectful Insolence for in essence laying down a load of po-…
oracknows | October 15, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I was until last evening. Unfortunately, I got back too late and was too tired to lay down some fresh Insolence, Respectful or otherwise. Fear not, though. I'll get to it. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
By the way, even though this post is three years old, the problem described in it has only gotten worse in the…
oracknows | October 14, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, over the last few days I was in Chicago attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting. At least, that's where I was until last evening. Unfortunately, I got back home too late and was thus too tired to lay down some fresh Insolence, Respectful or otherwise, for your edification today. Fear not, though. I'll get to it. In the meantime, here's another blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
Well, this is encouraging to see: A…
oracknows | October 13, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
I tried not to write about the altie obsession with "detoxification" again. Really, I did. It gets repetitive, and I don't…
oracknows | October 12, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you. Unfortunately, I see nothing that has changed since I originally wrote this. If anything, I underestimated the problem.…
oracknows | October 7, 2009
Watch CBS News Videos Online
A number of you sent me this link. It's to a video (above) of Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News' resident anti-vaccine propagandist, putting on a nauseating display of sucking up to Andrew Wakefield over his recent monkey study, the one that I deconstructed yesterday to show it for the lousy science that it is. Attkisson is a true believer. She's done this sort of thing before, occasionally to unintentionally hilarious effect; she's especially enamored of writing hit pieces on Paul Offit. Even worse, Attkisson is in bed with Generation Rescue and Age of Autism,…
oracknows | October 7, 2009As you may have noticed, I've fallen into a groove (or, depending on your point of view, a rut) writing about anti-vaccine lunacy. The reason is simple. While I was busy going nuts over Bill Maher's receiving the Richard Dawkins Award, the anti-vaccine movement has been busy, and there are some things I need to address that had backed up while I was distracted. There's one more thing I need to address before I move on to other topics.
Over the last couple of months, I've noticed something about the anti-vaccine movement. Specifically, I've noticed that the mavens of pseudoscience that make up…
oracknows | October 6, 2009Alright, I think I got the whole Maher/Dawkins thing out of my system for now. True, given the highly annoying reaction of one reader, I was half-tempted to write yet another post on the whole fiasco just out of spite, but I decided that spite in and of itself was not a good reason to write a blog post. Well, in this case it isn't, anyway, but if it were someone like Vox Day, or J.B. Handley, or a hapless quack or creationist, well, a wee bit of spite can make for some mighty fine blogging that's really fun to write. True, spite should never be the be-all and end-all of a blog, but certainly…
oracknows | October 4, 2009My first hometown, as many readers of this blog know, is Detroit, where I spent the first ten years or so of my life. My second hometown, as I pointed out a while back when a particularly loony city council candidate caught the eye of the skeptical blogosphere.
Unfortunately, I just found out that there's some more looniness going on there in a little more than a week. My cousin e-mailed me this notice:
Event: Mrs. Michigan Autism Lecture
Date: Thursday, October 15, 2009
Time: 6:30pm Location: Zerbo's Health Foods
Event Details:
Heidi Scheer is a national spokesperson for Autism Awareness…
oracknows | October 4, 2009I hadn't planned on writing much, if anything more, about the whole Bill Maher debacle, but PZ has shown up in my comments and graciously tried to explain what's going on at the AAI convention regarding the truly awful choice of Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award:
Look, I don't know what else I can say. I didn't endorse Maher; if they'd run this decision by me months ago, I would have said, "Are you nuts?". But of course, I have no clout with the AAI. Dawkins consented to the award initially, because he didn't know much about the full views held by the crackpot; he would certainly have…
oracknows | October 3, 2009...from PZ Myers at the AAI Convention:
The good news for all the critics of this choice is that Dawkins pulled no punches. In his introduction, he praised Religulous and thanked Maher for his contributions to freethought, but he also very clearly and unambiguously stated that some of his beliefs about medicine were simply crazy. He did a good job of walking a difficult tightrope; he made it clear that the award was granted for some specific worthy matters, his humorous approach to religion, while carefully dissociating the AAI from any endorsement of crackpot medicine. It won't be enough, I…
oracknows | October 2, 2009...for Bill Maher to receive the Richard Dawkins Award. It was a huge mistake on the part of the Atheist Alliance International to award it, for the reasons I've repeated ad nauseam over the last couple of weeks; so I won't go there again.
What I really want to know is what happened. I can't be in L.A. this weekend. Actually, I'd much rather be in London for TAM London than in L.A. anyway. Unfortunately, I can't be in either place (although I will be going to Chicago next weekend for the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress; keep that in mind if any of you Chicagoans wants to try a…
oracknows | October 1, 2009
The endgame is in sight. At the end of this post is a list of questions for Bill Maher tomorrow (if the opportunity presents itself), the vast majority of which you, my readers, thought of.
Let's backtrack a minute.
A couple of months ago, I learned that an award named after Richard Dawkins was being given to someone who was so radically, unbelievably unworthy of such an honor, that I likened giving the Richard Dawkins Award to Bill Maher to giving a public health award to Jenny McCarthy. (In deference to Professor Dawkins, perhaps I'll now liken it to giving such an award to MMR anti-…
oracknows | September 30, 2009I wil probably lose some respect from some of my readers by admitting this, but I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Dan Brown novels. I actually enjoyed The Da Vinci Code immensely as a jolly good read, as long as you're not too much of a stickler for anything resembling historical accuracy. Ditto Angels & Demons, although even I cringed at one of the most ham-handed bits of author foreshadowing every put into a highly popular novel. (Those of you who've read Angels & Demons no doubt know exactly what I'm talking about.) In fact, I'll probably eventually get a copy of Dan Brown's…
oracknows | September 29, 2009One of the most frustrating aspects of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" is how much it's managed to bypass the scientific orientation of academic medical institutions and insinuate itself deeply into medical academia. Indeed, Dr. R. W. Donnell once quite aptly referred to this phenomenon, where wildly implausible claims with no science behind them somehow find truck in some of the oldest and most prestigious academic medical centers, as "quackademic medicine." Therapeutic touch, reiki, acupuncture, it doesn't matter. Somehow, much of medical academia seems to have forgotten…
oracknows | September 28, 2009I promised last week in a post in which I described Bill Maher's latest pro-quackery remarks (this time, supporting cancer quackery), today is the day that I'm going to ask you, my readers, for some help. As I complained a while back, Bill Maher, who is anything but a rationalist or a booster of science (at least when it comes to medicine) is being awarded the Richard Dawkins Award by the Atheist Alliance International at its convention this weekend in Los Angeles.
As I said before, given that (1) the award lists "advocates increased scientific knowledge" as one of its criteria; (2) that…
oracknows | September 27, 2009Khhaaaaaannnn!
I mean, Arriiiaaaaannaaa!
Ever since its very inception, I've been--shall we say?--less than enthusiastic about the Huffington Post's medical blogging. Indeed, the level of anti-vaccine rhetoric there from the very beginning, back in 2005, astounded me. If anything, HuffPo's record has gotten even worse over the last four years, be it Deepak Chopra, or, in 2009, the addition of a variety of quacks to its roster, not to mention a brain-blisteringly stupid anti-vaccine rant by Fire Marshal Bill--I mean Jim Carrey--the promotion of "functional medicine" quackery by Mark Hyman, "…