medicine
oracknows | May 25, 2015Last year, I did several posts on what I consider to be a profoundly misguided and potentially harmful type of law known as "right-to-try." Beginning about a year and a half ago, promoted by the libertarian think tank known as the Goldwater Institute, right-to-try laws began popping up in state legislatures. I wrote about how these laws are far more likely to do harm than good, and that is a position that I maintain today. The idea behind these laws is to give terminally ill patients access to experimental drugs—in some cases drugs that have only passed phase I testing—that might help them.…
oracknows | May 22, 2015Antivaccine activism endangers children. Of that there is no longer any doubt. As vaccination rates fall, the risk of outbreaks of dangerous vaccine-preventable infectious diseases among children rise. In the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak earlier this year, several states introduced measures to restrict nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine requirements. The record in passing such measures has been mixed, at best, but California went one better in an act that was completely unexpected to me. Basically Senator Richard Pan, who also happens to be a pediatrician, introduced SB 277, a…
oracknows | May 21, 2015Epigenetics.
As I've described before, to alternative medicine practitioners, epigenetics seems to mean something akin to what the word "quantum" means: Magic. I've covered, for example, the woo-filled stylings of Deepak Chopra invoking things like "quantum consciousness," and seemingly for quite a few years the best way to slap a patina of "sciencey"-sounding credibility on a pseudoscientific medical treatment has been to add the word "quantum" to it. Perhaps the epitome of this tendency was the infamous Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface promoted by a rather—shall we say?—flamboyant…
oracknows | May 20, 2015Yesterday was a long day, starting in the operating room and finishing at a dinner reception for our visiting speaker today. As a result, when I arrived home, I was sawing the proverbial logs within five or ten minutes of hitting the couch, more or less without realizing it. I was going to just skip today, making it a rare weekday where I don't provide you, my loyal readers, with a dose of the Insolence, be it Respectful or not-so-Respectful, to which you have become accustomed. But then I saw an article that reminded me of a topic that I haven't revisited for quite a long time. I'm referring…
oracknows | May 19, 2015Once again, the yearly autism quackfest known as Autism One is fast approaching. In fact, it will begin in Chicago tomorrow: five days of "autism biomed" quackery and antivaccine pseudoscience. Ever since the Great Schism in the autism antivaccine quackery community, which severed Generation Rescue from Autism One and ended Jenny McCarthy's run of being the keynote speaker every year, it just hasn't been the same. Well, not quite. It turns out that a lot of the speakers are still the same, Generation Rescue or not, Jenny McCarthy or not. Just take a look at the speaker list, and you'll see a…
oracknows | May 18, 2015It's been a long time since I bothered to care if readers know where I live or who I am. That's why when a newbie troll shows up in the comments, as newbie trolls periodically do, and castigates me for somehow being a "coward" or "hiding" my identity, I generally get a hardy laugh out of it. My retort is usually that my "real" identity is among the worst kept secrets in the skeptical blogosphere. And so it is. If a reader can't figure out who I am with one or two Google searches, truly he is too dim-witted for me to take seriously. Be that as it may, I now take particular interest in…
oracknows | May 15, 2015Dedicated to lilady.
One of the disadvantages of writing for this blog is that sometimes I feel as though I spend so much time deconstructing bad science and pseudoscience in medicine that I'm rarely left with the time or the opportunity to discuss some interesting science. Of course, even when I do that, usually it's in the context of that very same bad science or pseudoscience, and this post won't be different. Still, there was some interesting science with respect to vaccines published last week in Science, and I think it's worth looking over. The only thing that surprises me is that the…
oracknows | May 14, 2015As much time and effort as I spend deconstructing, refuting, and otherwise demolishing the misinformation that is routinely promulgated about vaccines by the antivaccine movement, it's important never just to reflexly dismiss a claim or news story that gains traction among antivaccinationists. After all, it is always possible that the story is as the antivaccinationists represent it; possible, but not likely. Still, one must be careful not to be so close-minded that one leaps to dismiss a story just because of its source. That is skepticism, and it's a big difference—or at least should be—…
oracknows | May 13, 2015As I write this, I am sadder than I have been for a long time. I recently learned that a frequent commenter here, a woman whose efforts on behalf of children's health I admired greatly, has passed away. I'm referring to the commenter who went by the 'nym lilady and sometimes signed her comments with her first name, Connie. Although I knew her real name and approximately where she lived, I don't want to risk having antivaccine trolls try to contact her family in their time of sadness; so this tribute will refer to her by the online pseudonym by which she became known, lilady.
The first…
oracknows | May 13, 2015After having written yesterday's piece about the fallacy known as the appeal to nature, a favorite fallacy of the alternative medicine crowd. The idea that if something is somehow "natural" it must be superior to anything viewed as "unnatural" or "man-made" is deeply ingrained in pseudoscientific medicine. Heck, there's even a brand of quackery known as "naturopathy" because it supposedly utilizes the "healing power of nature" when in reality is takes what I sometimes call a "Chinese menu" approach to quackery; i.e., one from column A, two from column B, one from homeopathy, two from…
oracknows | May 12, 2015If there's one fallacy that grips the brains of proponents of "natural healing," "holistic medicine," or, as the vast majority of it is, quackery, it's an appeal to nature. Basically, the idea that underlies the appeal to nature is a profane worship of nature as being, in essence, perfect, with anything humans do that is perceived as somehow being "unnatural" being viewed as, at the very least, inferior and at the very worst pure evil. We see it in the pseudoscientific stylings of cranks like The Food Babe, whose epic appeals to nature are legendary in their stupidity, particularly her…
oracknows | May 11, 2015I've been blogging for over a decade now, a fact that I find really hard to believe looking back on it right now. I've told the story before, but it's worth briefly recounting again because doing so will explain why the story I'm about to discuss caught my attention. My "gateway drug," if you will, into skepticism was discovering Holocaust denial in the late 1990s on Usenet, a vast and sprawling conglomeration of thousands of discussion forums that began to fade away at the turn of the century with the rise of web-based forums and Google providing an interface to it to make it Google Groups.…
oracknows | May 8, 2015I've discussed on many occasions over the years how antivaccine activists really, really don't want to be known as "antivaccine." Indeed, when they are called "antivaccine" (usually quite correctly, given their words and deeds), many of them will clutch their pearls in indignation, rear up in self-righteous anger, and retort that they are "not antivaccine" but rather "pro-vaccine safety," "pro-health freedom," "parental rights," or some other antivaccine dog whistle that sounds superficially reasonable. In the meantime, they continue to do their best to demonize vaccines as dangerous, "toxin…
oracknows | May 6, 2015As hard as it is to believe, I've been spending a significant part of my time countering pseudoscience for close to 17 years, so long that it seems that I've always been doing it. Of course, that's not true; I didn't actually become involved in this seemingly never-ending Sisyphean task until I was in my mid-30s, which means that the majority of my life had been spent more or less blissfully ignorant that there are people out there who passionately believe, for example, that vaccines are dangerous and cause autism and that bleach enemas can reverse that autism or that there were quacks out…
oracknows | May 5, 2015Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging. So it was last night when I had to go to a work-related meeting and didn't get back until late. Still, that means today's a perfect opportunity to do what I'm usually not very good at: A brief post. I've related time and time again how when antivaccinationists claim to be "pro-vaccine safety" or "pro-freedom" (the latter of which is the newest favorite meme used by antivaccine advocates to argue that they aren't antivaccine, or, as I call it, an antivaccine dog whistle), they're either deluding themselves or lying. I've pointed out how sometimes…
oracknows | May 4, 2015Whenever I discuss the concept of being "antivaccine" and how almost nobody wants to have the label "antivaccine" applied ot her, it's not uncommon that I hear the whinging retort from antivaccinationists claiming that "I'm not antivaccine; I'm pro-vaccine safety," or some similar claim. Of course, whenever I see antivaccinationists likening vaccination to the Holocaust (and themselves to Jews wearing the Yellow Star of David), rape, and felonious assault, I realize that denials tend merely to help antivaccinationists convince themselves that they don't stand for something that society…
oracknows | May 1, 2015A common criticism aimed at those of us who are highly critical of various alternative medicine treatments and, in particular, of the "integration" of such treatments into conventional medical treatment is: What's the harm? What, they ask, is the harm of homeopathy, acupuncture, iridology, or traditional Chinese medicine? They argue that it's pretty much harmless, or, to quote Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about earth, harmless. Of course, fans of the novels know that Ford Prefect, a contributor to the guide, reacting to Earthling Arthur Dent's outrage that the entry for…
oracknows | April 29, 2015As hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when I didn't think that acupuncture was quackery, an ancient "Eastern" treatment that "evolved" from bloodletting not unlike bloodletting in ancient "Western" bloodletting. This time was, hard as it is to believe, less than eight years ago, right around the time just before I got involved with my not-so-super-secret other blog. I figured that, because acupuncture involves sticking needles into the body, maybe there might be something to it. That doesn't mean that I thought that there was something to it, only that back then I was a lot more…
oracknows | April 28, 2015I've written on multiple occasions of what I like to refer to as "antivaccine dog whistles." In politics, the term "dog whistle" refers to things politicians can say to certain groups, usually groups with odious views, that they are with them without actually echoing the views for which the group at which the dog whistle is aimed. The intended target audience gets the message, while those not familiar with the issues either don't get the message or see what is being said as something unobjectionable, even admirable. Think "states' rights" versus civil rights, for example.
It turns out that…
oracknows | April 27, 2015Over the years I've written about a lot of topics. After all, I've been at this for more than a decade now, and I still grind out four or five posts per week, with only occasional breaks for vacations or medical or scientific meetings. Topics have included science-based medicine, antivaccine nonsense, topics of general skepticism, and of course medical quackery, among others. There's one type of recurrent story I've been commenting on periodically since 2005, when I began by discussing the case of Katie Wernecke, and these include stories of children with cancer who do not receive the therapy…