medicine
oracknows | January 18, 2016I've been a big fan of David Bowie ever since high school. True, I didn't appreciate his less mainstream stuff as intensely as I do now until I had been in college a couple of years, but it's not an inaccurate to characterize the effect of David Bowie's art on my life as significant. Basically, I own pretty much everything he ever committed to CD or vinyl and have seen him in concert every time he's toured, starting with his Serious Moonlight Tour in 1983 and ending with his appearance at Madison Square Garden during his Reality Tour in December 2003. I saw him with Trent Reznor in 1995, and…
oracknows | January 17, 2016One of the recurring topics I write about is, of course, cancer quackery. It goes right back to the very beginning of this blog, to my very earliest posts more than 11 years ago. Over the years I've covered more cases than I can remember of patients relying on quackery instead of real medicine. In particular, tales of children with highly curable cancers being treated with quackery bother me most of all. Many have been the examples throughout the years: Abraham Cherrix, Katie Wernecke, Chad Jessop, Daniel Hauser, Sarah Hershberger, and teens like Cassandra Callender, who wanted to use…
oracknows | January 15, 2016I feel as though I'm experiencing an acid flashback to 2011, and I've never in my entire life once tried acid—or any mind-altering substance other than booze.
What am I talking about? Let's take a trip down memory lane, if you will, back to those halcyon days of—oh—five years ago. That was the time when I first took an interest in the Polish oncologist wannabe named Stanislaw Burzynski. Although I had mentioned him before because he featured prominently in Suzanne Somers' 2009 paean to quackery Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer–And How to Prevent Getting It in the First…
pharyngula | January 14, 2016A few days ago, David Bowie died of cancer. This morning I learned that the actor Alan Rickman has died of cancer. You all know the rule of threes, right? It has been satisfied, because in his state of the union address Barack Obama announced that he was going to kill American biological research, with cancer. OK, maybe that's a little strong: he was more devious about it. He announced a "moonshot" to cure cancer. It's the same thing.
US President Barack Obama isn’t going quietly. He began his final year in office by announcing a “moonshot” to cure cancer in his State of the Union address to…
oracknows | January 14, 2016Yesterday, I wrote about what can only be described as an academic travesty. What riled me up sufficiently to lay a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence on a graduate student named Judy Wilyman, her PhD thesis advisor Brian Martin, and the University of Wollongong was the fact that Wilyman is an antivaccine loon and the University of Wollongong saw fit to bestow a PhD on her for a thesis riddled with antivaccine tropes and pseudoscience. As I pointed out at the time, the University of Wollongong deserves nothing but ridicule and contempt for allowing this travesty to come to pass,…
oracknows | January 12, 2016I remember my PhD thesis.
In particular, I remember the years of work that went into it. I remember being grilled (with good, constructive intent) by my thesis committee a couple of times a year as I worked on it. I remember the many, many hours spend writing it. And, above all, I remember the hour-long seminar I had to give, followed by a couple of hours defending my thesis. The PhD thesis defense is usually the most stressful thing that PhD candidates go through on the path to earning their degree. Certainly it was for me.
Of course, the PhD thesis defense does contain a bit of an element…
oracknows | January 12, 2016Every so often there are studies that I really mean to write about but, for whatever reason, don't manage to get to. Sometimes I get a chance to get back to them. Sometimes I don't. This time around I'm getting back to such a topic. This time around it's a topic I've been meaning to write about is based on a couple of studies that came out three weeks ago that illustrate why, even if a patient ultimately comes around to science-based treatment of his cancer, the delay due to seeking out unscientific treatments can have real consequences.Consider this (probably) the last unfinished bit of…
oracknows | January 10, 2016While perusing the New York Times over the weekend, I was disturbed to see an article by Paul D. Thacker that basically advocated using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to request e-mails from scientists in search of undisclosed industry ties. The article was entitled, disturbingly, Scientists, Give Up Your Emails. Thacker, as you might recall, wrote a highly biased article with Charles Seife for PLoS One attacking scientists who work on and defend genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and foods made from them from pseudoscientific attacks by cranks like Vani Hari, better known as The…
oracknows | January 7, 2016This post will be different than my usual post. Let's just say that it has to do with quackery of a different kind than I usually write about here. It's about a public health disaster that was entirely preventable and had nothing to do with vaccines. It has to do with government malpractice on an epic scale, right here in my very own state. It's a story that's huge here in Michigan but doesn't seem to be penetrating the national news very much, at least not yet. I suspect that my international readers, most of whom are likely unaware of this story, will have to pick their jaws up off the…
oracknows | January 7, 2016It's an understatement to say that I'm not exactly a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), the institute formerly known as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and, even a year after its name change, probably still better known by its old moniker. Just type "NCCAM" or "NCCIH" into the search box of this blog if you don't believe me. Basically, it's an institution forced upon the National Institutes of Health in the 1990s by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), a woo-friendly senator who believed that bee pollen cured his allergies…
The CDC whistleblower documents: A whole lot of nothing and no conspiracy to hide an MMR-autism link
oracknows | January 4, 2016One of the stories dominating my blogging in 2015 was a manufactroversy that started in August 2014 when, after several months of rumbling in the antivaccine crankosphere that there was a CDC scientist ready to blow the whistle on an alleged coverup of evidence that vaccines cause autism, Andrew Wakefield, ever the publicity hog, released a video entitled CDC Whistleblower Revealed, in which he claimed that he had evidence of a "high level deception" of the American people about vaccine safety and revealed the "CDC Whistleblower" to be one William W. Thompson, PhD, a psychologist by training…
oracknows | December 31, 2015As 2015 draws to a close today, all I can think is: Another year in the can. Since my family is here, and it's a holiday, I'm going to keep this one brief and wish everyone a Happy New Year.
In addition, I can't help but wonder what's going to happen in 2016. Who could have predicted that last year would begin with a measles outbreak centered at Disneyland that would end up inspiring a law in California that I never would have thought possible, namely SB 277, which eliminates nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates. Who could have predicted that the antivaccine movement, in…
oracknows | December 29, 2015Vaccines and the antivaccine movement were in the news a lot in 2015. The year started out with a huge measles outbreak originating at Disneyland over the holidays last year and dominated news coverage in the early months of 2015. This outbreak had enormous consequences. It galvanized public opinion such that something I had never thought possible before, least of all in the hotbed of the antivaccine movement that is California, became possible. After a prolonged debate, the California legislature passed SB 277, a law that, beginning with the 2016-2017 school year, eliminated nonmedical…
oracknows | December 28, 2015Several years ago, Harriet Hall coined a term that is most apt: Tooth fairy science. The term refers to clinical trials and basic science performed on fantasy. More specifically, it refers to doing research on a phenomenon before it has been scientifically established that the phenomenon exists. Harriet put it this way:
You could measure how much money the Tooth Fairy leaves under the pillow, whether she leaves more cash for the first or last tooth, whether the payoff is greater if you leave the tooth in a plastic baggie versus wrapped in Kleenex. You can get all kinds of good data that is…
oracknows | December 28, 2015I've frequently noted that one of the things most detested by quacks and promoters of pseudoscience is peer review. Creationists hate peer review. HIV/AIDS denialists hate it. Anti-vaccine cranks like those at Age of Autism hate it. Indeed, as blog bud Mark Hoofnagle Mark Hoofnagle, pointed out several years ago, pseudoscientists and cranks of all stripes hate it. There's a reason for that, of course, namely that it's hard to pass peer review if you're peddling pseudoscience, although, unfortunately, with the rise of "integrative medicine," it's nowhere near as difficult as it once was.
Be…
oracknows | December 23, 2015Christmas and New Years are almost here. As a result, as is always the case this time of year, we're being flooded with "year end" lists. These lists are a fun distraction that I actually rather look forward to as an amusing (and sometimes annoying) year end tradition. In particular, I'm a sucker for "best of the year" and "worst of the year" lists, particularly the latter. Unfortunately, I've usually been too lazy to construct such lists of my own, but maybe this year will be different and next week I'll do so. Or not.
Be that as it may, it gave me a bit of a chuckle to see that Mike Adams…
oracknows | December 21, 2015[NOTE added 12/23/2015: It would appear that the offending article has been taken down. I, of course, have screenshots, and, of course, the Google cached version is still around for the moment.]
Anaphylaxis can be deadly. Anaphylaxis can kill. More than that, anaphylaxis can kill pretty quickly.
Even the most dimwitted purveyor of "natural" cures should know that and stay away from "natural" treatments for anaphylaxis, while the smarter snake oil salesmen also know that you can't afford to mess around with a medical condition that can cause such rapid deterioration from seemingly perfectly…
oracknows | December 21, 2015One of the best things about blogging is that I don't feel obligated to cover a topic completely in one post because I know I can always write another one or revisit the topic later. It also allows me to look at what I like to call "variations on a theme" of various kinds of quackery (or anything else, for that matter). View this as a post looking at one such variation on a theme.
The theme this time is the tendency of antivaccine activists to demonstrate their utter cluelessness when it comes to designing clinical studies. This cluelessness virtually always manifests itself in the frequent…
oracknows | December 18, 2015One of my favorite television shows right now is The Knick, as I described before in a post about medical history. To give you an idea of how much I'm into The Knick, I'll tell you that I signed up for Cinemax for three months just for that one show. (After its second season finale airs next Friday, I'll drop Cinemax until next fall.) The reason why I'm bringing up The Knick (besides I love the show and need to bring it up at least once a year) is because an article by Malcolm Gladwell published earlier this week in The New Yorker entitled Tough Medicine, which is a commentary based on a new…
oracknows | December 16, 2015Whenever I point out that a very common thread of "thought"—if you can call it "thought"—in alternative medicine is nothing more than germ theory denialism, the usual reaction is incredulity. Newbies who haven't encountered quacks before invariably do a double take when I inform them that germ theory denialism is a thing, particularly among antivaccine activists. (After all, vaccines don't make sense if microorganisms don't cause disease.) Yet, time and time again I find examples of quacks who deny that disease is a consequence of infection. In fact, some go so far as to try to argue in the…