medicine
oracknows | November 14, 2014
It’s been a long and entertaining week. Well, at least part of the week was entertaining. After all, it was hard not to be mightily amused at what happened when Dr. Mehmet Oz, known to the world as America’s Doctor but to skeptics as America’s Quack, asked his Twitter followers to ask him anything under the hashtag #OzsInBox. It was, to put it mildly, a train wreck, but to skeptics it was an enormously entertaining train wreck. It seems fitting to finish it off with yet another example that provides compelling evidence of just how quacky naturopathy is. Why? Because it’s a point that can’t…
oracknows | November 13, 2014
Of the many lies and myths about vaccines that stubbornly persist despite all evidence showing them not only to be untrue but to be risibly, pseudoscientifically untrue, among whose number are myths that vaccines cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, and a syndrome that so resembles shaken baby syndrome (more correctly called abusive head trauma) that shaken baby syndrome is a misdiagnosis for vaccine injury, the lie that vaccines are being used for population control is one of the most persistent. In this myth, vaccines are not designed to protect the populations of impoverished…
oracknows | November 12, 2014
Getting old sucks. I had a relatively long and busy day in the operating room yesterday, the kind of day that not so long ago I’d handle with no problem. This time around, though, it wiped me out, to the point where not long after dinner I crashed. Hard. Then I woke up around midnight long enough to drag my sorry posterior upstairs to my bed. It happens. It’s just that it seems to be happening more often these days.
So it was that I missed one of the most amusing Twitter happenings that I’ve seen in a long time; that is; until I woke up again early this AM. Dr. Oz just got pwned on Twitter…
oracknows | November 11, 2014
Sigh.
Just a week ago, I deconstructed an awful article touting how the mass of prescientific quackery known as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as somehow being “validated” by modern science. Specifically, some truly misguided scientists were attempting to use modern systems biology techniques to look for biomarkers associated with TCM diagnoses such as “hot” or “cold” syndromes, specifically with respect to rheumatoid arthritis. The article is an example of just how the false narrative of TCM has taken hold. Although the article acknowledged that there was little evidence to support…
oracknows | November 9, 2014Medical conspiracy theories tend to involve “someone” hiding something from the public. I like to refer to this as the fallacy of “secret knowledge.” That “someone” hiding the “secret knowledge” is usually the government, big pharma, or other ill-defined nefarious forces. The “secret knowledge” being hidden comes invariably in one of two flavors. Either “they” are hiding cures for all sorts of diseases that conventional medicine can’t cure, or “they” are hiding evidence of harm due to something in medicine. Although examples of the former are common, such as the “hidden cure for cancer,” it…
oracknows | November 7, 2014
Gayle DeLong has been diagnosed with what she refers to as “autism-induced” breast cancer.” She’s even given it an abbreviation, AIBC. Unfortunately, as you might be able to tell by the name she’s given her breast cancer, she is also showing signs of falling into the same errors in thinking with respect to her breast cancer as she clearly has with respect to autism. As a breast cancer surgeon, regardless of my personal opinion of DeLong’s anti-vaccine beliefs, I can only hope that she comes to her senses and undergoes science-based treatment, but I fear she will not, as you will see. Her…
oracknows | November 6, 2014
Two months ago, one of the strangest stories ever to be flogged by antivaccine activists was insinuating its way throughout social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and everywhere else, where antivaccine activists were engaged in a frantic effort to get the attention of mainstream media regarding their belief that there was a "CDC whistleblower" who had revealed a "cover up" that results from a CDC study looking at age of receiving MMR vaccination was studied as a potential risk factor for autism had shown that African-American boys showed a more than three-fold increased risk due to MMR…
oracknows | November 4, 2014
I was a bit angry yesterday. I’m never happy when I see the overarching narrative that prescientific and pseudoscientific beliefs are equivalent and worth doing clinical trials on them. But the irritation I feel when I see examples of journalists credulously swallowing that narrative whole and regurgitating it in mainstream publications like the Wall Street Journal is nothing compared to the anger that is provoked when I see one of the worst antivaccine lies of all being promulgated by a person known for promoting it.
The person is Christina England. The tactic is trying to blame the…
oracknows | November 3, 2014
They are winning.
I’ve spent nearly ten years on this blog and nearly seven years at my not-so-super secret other blog (where I will likely crosspost this over the weekend) discussing the infiltration of quackery into medicine, both in academic medical centers and, increasingly, even in community medical centers. There’s a term that I wish I had coined but do frequently use to describe this infiltration: Quackademic medicine. Over the last 30 years or so, what was once quackery, rightly dismissed in a famous 1983 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine as a “pabulum of common…
oracknows | November 3, 2014
You know how I sometimes lament that I’ve been writing too much about the hijinx of the antivaccine movement, its crimes against reason, science, and medicine? It’s become a bit of a trope around here at times, to the point where, when I bring it up, I tell myself I shouldn’t be repeating myself so often. Then I do it anyway because, heck, this is blogging and it’s impossible to blog for a decade without repeating one’s self. Besides, if I’m to start navel-gazing here in a blog sense, a successful blog actually needs certain repeating tropes, as long as they’re relatively entertaining or…
oracknows | October 31, 2014One thing that happened this week that I didn’t get around to writing about is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jonas Salk, which was October 28. In the annals of medicine, few people have had as immediate a positive effect as Jonas Salk did when he developed the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). At the time the IPV became available in 1955, annual epidemics of polio were a regular feature of American life, causing panics and closing public swimming pools with a distressing frequency, causing thousands of cases of paralysis per year and many deaths. Indeed, in 1952 one particularly bad…
oracknows | October 29, 2014
If there is one thing that the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Africa has revealed to the world, it’s the full extent of quackery that is out there and advertised as being able to treat deadly diseases such as Ebola. The deadlier the disease, the more quackery is out there, amplified by the scariness of the disease. And, make no mistake about it, Ebola is scary. No, it’s not scary here in the U.S., where the odds of the average person catching the disease, particularly if he’s not a health care worker who’s directly cared for a patient with Ebola, is vanishingly tiny. If you happen to live in…
oracknows | October 28, 2014
One of the biggest medical conspiracy theories for a long time has been that there exist out there all sorts of fantastic cures for cancer and other deadly diseases but you can’t have them because (1) “they” don’t want you to know about them (as I like to call it, the Kevin Trudeau approach) and/or (2) the evil jackbooted thugs of the FDA are so close-minded and blinded by science that they crush any attempt to market such drugs and, under the most charitable assessment under this myth, dramatically slow down the approval of such cures. The first version usually involves “natural” cures or…
oracknows | October 27, 2014Grant deadline today, which means I didn’t have time to produce yet another scintillating epic for my not-so-super-secret other blog. I did, however, have time to take note of a highly annoying thing on Facebook that was brought to my attention last night and is worth a brief mention here, so that the blog doesn’t go without a post today.
The National Vaccine Information Center, founded and run by Barbara Loe Fisher, is about as antivaccine as they come. It’s also pretty blatant about spreading misinformation about vaccines hither, thither, and yon, disguised as “vaccine safety” public…
oracknows | October 22, 2014
The antivaccine movement and conspiracy theories go together like beer and Buffalo wings, except that neither are as good as, yes, beer and Buffalo wings. Maybe it’s more like manure and compost. In any case, the antivaccine movement is rife with conspiracy theories. I’ve heard and written about more than I can remember right now, and I’m under no illusion that I’ve heard anywhere near all of them. Indeed, it seems that every month I see a new one.
There is, however, a granddaddy of conspiracy theories among antivaccinationists, or, as I like to call it, the central conspiracy theory of…
oracknows | October 21, 2014
Supporters of science-based medicine and keeping pseudoscience out of medicine have a few years to prepare for an onslaught of crappy studies “proving” the value of “integrative” oncology. No doubt at this point you’re wondering just what the heck Orac is talking about. I will tell you. It involves an institution we’ve encountered before and a naturopath we’ve met before, specifically the Ottawa Integrative Cancer Centre and Dugald Seely, ND (translation: Not a Doctor), FABNO (translation: Not an Oncologist). Somehow, Dugald Seely and his brother Andrew have somehow scored some sweet,…
pharyngula | October 21, 2014I have to admit that my first response to these reports out of Britain that stem cells had been successfully used to repair a complete spinal cord transection was skepticism -- incredulity even. They're reporting that a man with a completely severed spinal cord at level T10-T11 is able to walk again! The Guardian gushes! The Daily Mail gets in the act (always a bad sign)! When I read that the patient had an 8mm gap in his spinal cord that had been filling up with scar tissue for the last two years, I was even more doubtful: under the best of conditions, it was unlikely that you'd get…
sa smith | October 21, 2014Remember how I said my lab wanted to do a PPE response video to Sanjay Guptas terrifying attempt? But we couldnt for liability reasons?
Now there is an even better option! We can all take a peek into how Ebola patients are treated at Emory University, and get to see their protocols for putting on/taking off PPE:
Emory Healthcare launches Ebola protocols website as resource on prevention and patient care
But before you can see their videos, you have to 1) register, and 2) agree not to hold Emory University responsible if you get infected with Ebola.
The information provided on this site,…
oracknows | October 19, 2014
I'm beginning to feel that I'm flogging a topic a bit too hard again. Usually, this happens primarily when I'm on a roll over some particularly tasty ridiculous tidbit of antivaccine nonsense. This time around, it's not so much antivaccine nonsense (although some did manage to slip its way into the discussion) but rather Ebola virus disease. In particular, it's the conspiracy theories and quackery that have sprung up in the media like so much kudzu smothering rational and science-based discourse, revealing the depths of distrust based on politics, pseudoscience, and just plain nonsense…
oracknows | October 17, 2014
I realize that yesterday’s post was even longer than my usual post (and, given who I am, that’s saying something), but there was a thought that popped up last night about the Ebola conspiracy theories that I discussed that I can’t resist finishing the week on with a (hopefully) much more concise post. (I know, it’s me; conciseness is not exactly what Orac is about.) I know that, after a decade at this whole skeptical blogging thing, it shouldn’t bother me, but it still does. I’m referring to what these Ebola virus disease conspiracy theories say about how “they” view “us.”
First of all,…