medicine
oracknows | October 16, 2014
Does anyone remember the H1N1 influenza pandemic? As hard as it is to believe, that was five years ago. One thing I remember about the whole thing is just how crazy both the antivaccine movement and conspiracy theorists (but I repeat myself) went over the public health campaigns to vaccinate people against H1N1. It was truly an eye-opener, surpassing even what I expected based on my then five year experience dealing with such cranks. Besides the usual antivaccine paranoia that demonized the vaccine as, alternately, ineffective, full of “toxins,” a mass depopulation plot, and many other…
oracknows | October 15, 2014
Things got a bit hectic the other day; so if this seems familiar, forgive me. On the other hand, I do believe that this material is probably more suited to this blog rather than other blogs, given the history here and how long I've been covering the quackery spawned by Andrew Wakefield, arguably the most famous antivaccine guru in the world.
This time around, I'm talking about a report published over the weekend by Brian Deer. Deer, as you might recall, remains the one journalist who was able to crack the facade of seeming scientific legitimacy built up by antivaccine guru Andrew Wakefield…
oracknows | October 14, 2014
A common topic that I’ve written about since the very beginning of this blog is the infiltration of quackery into what were formerly bastions of science-based medicine. Most recently, I lamented just how far this process has progressed at the Cleveland Clinic, as evidenced by its recent opening of a clinic devoted to the quackery that is functional medicine and, not long before that, its opening a clinic run by a dubious naturopath practicing traditional Chinese medicine. That’s not even counting its long-standing credulous promotion of the faith healing known as reiki and the use of…
oracknows | October 12, 2014A few weeks ago, I wrote a post in which I explained why wearing a bra does not cause breast cancer. After I had finished the post, it occurred to me that I should have saved that post for now, given that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The reason is that, like clockwork, pretty much every year around this time articles touting various myths about breast cancer will go viral, circulating on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr like so many giant spider-microbes on the moon a week ago. Sometimes, they’re new articles. Sometimes they’re old articles that, like…
sa smith | October 12, 2014On an academic level, I am not a fan of bacteria. I like viruses. Thus, I usually like the idea of using viruses to kill bacteria. But I am a huge fan of fecal bacteriotherapy, aka, poop transplants.
Someone is sick, they get antibiotics. Antibiotics kill off their 'normal' bacteria, and allow 'bad' bacteria, like Clostridium difficile, to thrive. C. diff is a dangerous, increasingly drug resistant bacteria that kills, according to Wikipedia, 300 people a day.
Fecal bacteriotherapy is replacing the C. diff patients good bacteria with gut bacteria from someone else. Gut bacteria, normally…
pharyngula | October 10, 2014That atavistic cancer hypothesis is actually fueling the work of quacks: Orac has been getting threats from a Frank Arguello, who runs a crank cancer mill called "Atavistic Chemotherapy".
It's amazing stuff. It goes on and on about how cancer represents a reversion to the old cell types of single-celled organisms, and how modern chemotherapy is useless and dangerous, so he has a better formula: safe, harmless, and revolutionary. You'll never guess what it is.
He's treating cancer patients with antibiotics.
The drugs used in combination have been selected based on the principles of "Atavistic…
oracknows | October 10, 2014Well, Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014 (or, as I like to refer to it, Quackery Week) is fast drawing to a close; so I figured I’d end it with one last post. Since several of you liked my post a couple of days ago Sh*t naturopaths say and agreed with me when I suggested at the end that I ought to make this a recurring feature on the old blog here. So, how better to finish off Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014 than with another installment of Sh*t naturopaths say. In fact, I might even have to make it a tag. After all, I’m sure naturopaths will continue to provide me with quackery to deconstruct,…
oracknows | October 8, 2014
Quackery has been steadily infiltrating academic medicine for at least two decades now in the form of what was once called “complementary and alternative medicine” but is now more commonly referred to as “integrative medicine.” Of course, as I’ve written many times before, what “integrative medicine” really means is the “integration” of quackery with science- and evidence-based medicine, to the detriment of SBM. As my good bud Mark Crislip once put it, “integrating” cow pie with apple pie does not improve the apple pie. Yet that is what’s going on in medical academia these days—with a…
oracknows | October 8, 2014
I mentioned yesterday that this week is Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014, or, as I like to call it, Quackery Week. At the time, I wasn’t sure when or if I was going to do another post about the quackery that is naturopathy this week. I was going to play it by ear and see what came up. Then, one of my commenters mentioned this subreddit, Read what naturopaths say to one another. Conclusion: manipulative, poorly trained, and a threat to public health. Now, I’m not a big fan of Reddit, largely because I can’t figure out how to find things easily, and I hate the sheer ugly and user hostile…
oracknows | October 6, 2014
In my eagerness to note that Brian Hooker’s “reanalysis” of a ten year old study that failed to find a correlation between vaccines and autism had been retracted, I forgot to write about what I was originally planning on writing about yesterday. It actually would have been more appropriate a topic for yesterday, because it was the beginning of a week. In fact, it was the beginning of a very special week for a certain class of quacks. No, it’s not homeopathy week. Here’s a hint: Do any of you remember this time last year? Sure, I knew you did.
We’re talking Quackery Week 2014! I mean…
dr. dolittle | October 6, 2014 Image from the American Physiological Society's website.http://www.the-aps.org/mm/Conferences/APS-Conferences/2014-Conferences/…
As anticipated, the meeting today was excellent! Here are some highlights from today:
Dr. Michael Joyner (Mayo Clinic) spoke about how we should reconsider animal models that are used in research as laboratory rodents can be manipulated to match their genotype to their phenotype. In other words, researchers modify the animal's genome to produce a specific disease or attribute they are interested in studying. The problem with this approach is that genes can be…
oracknows | October 5, 2014
These things always seem to happen on Friday. Well, not really. It’s probably just confirmation bias, but it seems that a lot of things I’d like to blog about happen on a Friday. That leaves me the choice of either breaking my unofficial rule not to blog on the weekend or waiting until Monday, when the news tidbit might not be quite so...timely anymore. This time around, I decided to wait because, well, we’re getting into grant season again, and I could use the time to work on grants.
It is, however, good news. Very good news indeed. Remember Brian Hooker’s absolutely incompetent “…
oracknows | October 3, 2014
Countering the misinformation regularly promulgated by the antivaccine movement, be it antivaccinationists who are completely off the deep end, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the crew at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, or that epitome of the Dunning-Kruger effect mixed with an annoying self-absorption and coffee klatch vibe (that is when it's not a wine party), The Thinking Moms' Revolution, or from seemingly more "reasonable" antivaccine advocates like pediatricians Robert "Dr. Bob" Sears or Dr. Jay Gordon. The reason is simple. Vaccines save lives. They prevent children from…
oracknows | October 2, 2014
As I mentioned yesterday, here it’s that time of year again: October. Breast Cancer Awareness Month. While the topic of my post then was how antivaccine activists have tried to glom on to the attention that Breast Cancer Awareness Month gets in order to create their fake “awareness month” known as “Vaccine Injury Awareness Month,” unfortunately antivaccinationists are not the only quacks who take advantage of the various “awareness” months to peddle their quackery. Naturally, because Breast Cancer Awareness Month is one of the oldest and definitely the best known of these various disease…
oracknows | October 1, 2014Orac is feeling a little under the weather. I appear to have caught some respiratory crud that’s going around, which, fortunately, isn’t so bad that I can’t go to work, particularly given that today is a lab/office day, but unfortunately made me feel too tired last night to create one of my usual peerless examples of insolent blogging. So this post will be a followup to yesterday’s post and a lead-in to a question I want to pose to you, my readers. Let’s make things a bit interactive.
First the followup. As you might recall, yesterday, I found an example that helps to illustrate why most…
oracknows | September 29, 2014
One of the things you can say to someone who is antivaccine that will really tick them off is to “call it like you see it” and call them antivaccine. Sure, there are a few antivaccine activists who are unashamed of being antivaccine, but most antivaccinationists, sensing that society in general quite correctly takes a dim view of people who threaten to allow the return of dangerous vaccine-preventable diseases. Indeed, as I’ve pointed out many times before, that’s why antivaccine activists try to hide behind claims that they are “vaccine safety advocates,” often signified by saying, “I’m…
oracknows | September 28, 2014
One of the central themes of this blog from the very beginning is that all medicine, regardless of where it comes from or how it was developed, should be held to a single science-based standard with regards to efficacy, effectiveness, and safety. I tend to focus primarily on “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), now more commonly known as “integrative medicine,” (1) because I believe it to be undermining the scientific basis of medicine and allowing outright quackery (or, as I like to refer to it, quackademic medicine) to infiltrate medical academia, which is fast becoming medical…
oracknows | September 26, 2014
It’s been a bad week for celebrity quacks; that is, after starting out looking as though it would be a good week. For example, as I discussed a couple of days ago, contender for the title of world’s most brain dead antivaccine conspiracy theorist, washed up comedian Rob Schneider, having somehow managed to land a gig resurrecting his 20 year old “Richmeister” character (a.k.a. the “Makin’ Copies Guy”) in the service of an ad campaign for State Farm Insurance, found his ad dropped like the proverbial Ebola-laced bedding when State Farm was made aware of Schneider’s virulently antivaccine…
oracknows | September 25, 2014Ever since the latest outbreak of Ebola viral disease in West Africa, there has been panic that’s metastasized to the US, even though the risk of a major outbreak here is very low. Unfortunately, whenever there’s panic over a disease, whatever the disease is, there soon follows quackery in response to that panic, from quacks who are either looking to make a buck or who are true believers (or both). For instance, I’ve seen high dose vitamin C touted as an Ebola remedy. I’ve also written about deluded homeopaths claiming that homeopathy can be used to treat Ebola. One particularly deluded…
oracknows | September 24, 2014
I’m a State Farm customer. I have been for a very long time. To be honest, I’m not sure if it’s inertia or the discounts that State Farm gives me because I’ve been with the company for so long. On the other had, I’ve had no complaints. State Farm’s service has been fine, and on the couple of occasions I had to make a claim the company didn’t jerk me around. Even better, it didn’t raise my rates because of it. So I had no plans to change my home or auto insurance to another company. At least, such was the case until I saw this:
Yes, that’s Rob Schneider reprising his role as Richard…