complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | November 21, 2008Leave it to an infectious disease specialist (Dr. Mark Crislip) to dismantle the most recent favorite talking point of the antivaccine fringe, namely "too many too soon," that deceptive and scientifically ignorant concept that somehow the current vaccine schedule "overwhelms" the immune system of infants, causing all manner of chronic health conditions and neurological problems, including autism. In his usual characteristic level of sarcasm that earns him a tip of the hat as far as not-so-respectful insolence goes, he entitles his lesson:
The infection schedule versus the vaccine schedule.
It…
oracknows | November 21, 2008
I had thought about taking the day off after celebrating the 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle yesterday, but a skeptic's work is never done, and, besides, my wife's out of town for a couple of days. Given the choice of television, working on my program's section of our cancer center core grant or one of the two other grants I'm currently juggling, or blogging, I wonder what appeals to me more. Hmmmm....
Ah, screw it. I've been living my work nearly every waking hour for the last few days. Heck, I even got stuck at work fairly late last night because of the bane of being s surgeon,…
oracknows | November 20, 2008
PROLOGUE
LOCATION: The Liberator, cruising through space.
GAN: Are you sure it's fully switched on?
ORAC: Of course I'm properly switched on. Having depressed the activator button what else would you expect?
CALLY: It's his voice.
BLAKE: It's exactly as though Ensor were speaking.
ORAC: Surely it is obvious even to the meanest intelligence that during my development I would naturally become endowed with aspects of my creator's personality.
AVON: The more endearing aspects by the sound of it.
ORAC: Possibly. However similarities between myself and Ensor are entirely superficial. My mental…
oracknows | November 19, 2008It looks as though the Jenny McCarthy woo factor has claimed two more celebrity victims' brains. If a recently viewed press release is any indication, it appears that Anthony Edwards and Dustin Hoffman are getting into the autism quackery business:
Internet Marketing Company joins Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, Dustin Hoffman, Anthony Edwards and others in fight to help children with Autism.
GREENSBORO, N.C. (June 4, 2008) -- Market America announced today that it is in the development and testing stages of a new line of nutraceutical products that will support the health of children with Autism…
oracknows | November 19, 2008Busy, busy, busy.
Between work and getting ready to for the 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle on Thursday as I mentioned on Monday, I'm afraid I don't have time for my usual sterling gems of skeptically insolent prose or an analysis of a scientific paper that a couple of my readers have sent me. If too many science or medical bloggers haven't totally deconstructed it by then, maybe I'll take it on either on Friday or Monday. Until then, if you haven't gotten me an entry to the Skeptics' Circle yet, you still have about 12 hours left until the deadline at 6 PM EST.
In the meantime, that…
oracknows | November 18, 2008I was in a bit of a crappy mood last night.
There were a number of reasons for this, including frustration at work trying to put together two grants, trying to revise a manuscript to resubmit it, dealing with collaborators and various other headaches. Indeed I had a splitting headache by the end of the day when I finally hit the road for the commute home. Things were so bad that I seriously considered actually going to bed and not bothering at all with the blog. I know, I know, such a thing has seldom happened in the nearly four years I've been doing this blog. It must be my obsessive…
oracknows | November 17, 2008Everyone knows that the quackery-friendly, antivaccine blog Age of Autism has a rather--shall we say?--hypocritical stance when it comes to free speech. For one thing, for all their complaints about censorship and not being heard by the government, its denizens frequently confuse freedom of speech with freedom from criticism. For another thing, they also ruthlessly censor comments that they do not like on their blog itself. Worst of all, they tacitly support the "outing" of pseudonymous commenters if such commenters annoy them enough.
Someone's finally gotten tired of it. Indeed, someone has…
oracknows | November 17, 2008I almost feel sorry for acupuncturists these days. Almost.
Well, not exactly. Clearly, given the infiltration of woo into academic medicine, acupuncturists are in demand even in the most allegedly "science-based" of academic medical centers. After all, acupuncture is what I like to refer to as "gateway woo," an unscientific placebo-based therapy that has somehow come to be viewed as seemingly respectable, as though there's something to it. It's not hard to see why acupuncture has achieved this status. Indeed, there was a time when I, the arch-skeptic, the guy who has built up one of the top…
oracknows | November 14, 2008I realize that I made perhaps the biggest splash I've made on this blog in a very, very long time when I wrote about the news reports and rumors that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was being seriously considered for a high ranking post in the new Obama Administration. Fortunately, this is not yet another post about RFK, Jr. There's only so much antivaccinationist and pseudoscientific lunacy I can take. Unfortunately, however, it's another touch of woo associated with the new administration. Even though I don't think it means much, chiropractors seem to be interpreting it as a nod of support:
I am…
oracknows | November 13, 2008
The things I do for my readers.
I'm referring to a movie entitled The Beautiful Truth, links to whose website and trailers several of you have e-mailed to me over the last couple of weeks. Maybe it's because the movie is only showing in New York and Los Angeles and hasn't made it out of the media enclaves of those cities out to the rest of us in flyover country, or maybe its release is so limited that I just hadn't heard of it. Certainly that appears to be the case, as the schedule shown at the website lists it as beginning an engagement in New York tomorrow and running through November 20…
oracknows | November 10, 2008One whole year of antivaccinationist lunacy, that is.
Sorry, that's one birthday I won't be sending good wishes over. No other blog brings home the stupid when it comes to vaccines with such regularity. It's a veritable black hole of intellect there, from which no science and reason is ever seen to escape.
oracknows | November 10, 2008I had been planning on taking on a couple of articles about breast cancer to start out the week. However, between having to deal with a tsunami of leaves before Monday, when the giant trucks come along to pick them up today and a number of other issues, I didn't have time. As much as I love taking a recent study and doing an in-depth analysis, such posts take probably twice as much time for me to do as the average post. Unfortunately, various issues this weekend prevented that, at least for today.
Fortunately, there's always homeopathy.
Yes, homeopathy is always there for the easy post. Even…
oracknows | November 7, 2008As I've said before many times, herbal or plant-based medicines are about the only kind of "alternative" medicine that has significant prior scientific plausibility based on what we know about science. That's because plants often contain biologically active molecules; i.e., they often contain drugs. Of course, the problem with plant-based medicines is that they are, in essence, highly contaminated drugs, the predictability of whose responses is variable because the amount of active ingredient can vary widely.
There's also a problem when claims for a plant-based compound become grandiose. It…
oracknows | November 6, 2008Yesterday, I wrote about a very disturbing development (disturbing, at least, to the science-based community) in the transition to an Obama Administration. That disturbing development is the multiple reports that antivaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is being seriously considered to head the Environmental Protection Agency or even the Department of the Interior. Given RFK, Jr.'s conspiracy-mongering over vaccines, his utter failure to change his belief that mercury in vaccines causes autism in the face of overwhelming evidence that it does not. My argument was that appointing someone who is…
oracknows | November 5, 2008One of the aspects of the Barack Obama candidacy that raised my hopes and those of so many of my fellow ScienceBloggers, as well as scientists tired of the crass politicization of science under the Bush administration, was the prospect of an Administration in which science and reason were valued and in which cranks were not allowed to impose their agenda on agencies whose policies should be driven by the science. That's one reason why I was very disturbed when I read a post on Election Day suggesting that antivaccinationist crank and activist extraordinaire, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was being…
oracknows | November 5, 2008I guess Barack Obama's mad hypnotic powers worked.
One non-political thing that this election has reminded me of is that when you've been blogging as long as I have (nearly four years now--almost as long as a Presidential term!--assuming you're good and have found a niche in the blogosphere, you can become one of the "go-to" bloggers for certain subjects. Even though I've taken on the pseudonym (and, some might say, the persona) of a cranky talking computer with a bad attitude that looked like a cheap Plexiglas box of multicolored blinking lights and was featured in a 30 year old British…
oracknows | November 4, 2008OK, even though I have said time and time again that I rarely do any posts that are strictly political in nature, mainly because political bloggers are a dime a dozen, great political bloggers are rare, and I don't consider myself anything better than an at best passable political blogger. However, when politics intersects my areas of medical interest, I can't resist diving in, and unfortunately, Walter Olson gave me a reason to dive in today. In fact, to some extent he killed my election day buzz about the prospects for an Obama victory and a return to a government that respects science and…
oracknows | November 3, 2008Remember the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)?
It's been a long time since I've written much about the AAPS, of course, but refreshing your memory will be easy. It's the ultra-libertarian wingnut medical "association" that routinely scrapes the bottom of the barrel, as far as pseudoscience goes, as long as that pseudoscience fits in with their schizophrenic combination of Ayn Randian "superman" libertarianism mixed with a toxic brew of anti-immigration, antivaccinationism, HIV/AIDS denialism, and social conservatism that leads them to lie about the evidence to argue that…
oracknows | October 31, 2008I feel bad.
I realize that I've been completely neglecting my Academic Woo Aggregator. You remember my Academic Woo Aggregator, don't you? It was my attempt to compile a near-definitive list of academic medical centers that had "integrated" woo into their divisions or departments of "integrative medicine" (i.e., departments of academic-sounding quackery). Perusing it, I now realize that it's been over five months since I did a significant update to it. You just know that, given the rate of infiltration of unscientific medical practices into medical academia as seemingly respectable treatment…
oracknows | October 30, 2008I ask this question because I have seen something I have never seen before, something so earth-shattering that I wonder if the very axis of the earth has shifted, something so incredible that I have to pinch myself to make sure that I'm not living some unbelievably bizarre dream. I half expect the heavens to open and reveal the Second Coming. What could provoke such incredulity in me?
WorldNetDaily has published an article that is science-based and makes sense. A sample:
Much more disturbingly, McCarthy attacked Peet for daring to disagree with her. "She has a lot of [nerve] to come forward…