medicine
oracknows | February 16, 2014The last couple of weeks, I've made allusions to the "Bat Signal" (or, as I called it, the "Cancer Signal," although that's a horrible name and I need to think of a better one). Basically, when Bat Cancer Signal goes up (hey, I like that one better, but do bats get cancer?), it means that a study or story has hit the press that demands my attention. It happened again just last week, when stories started hitting the press hot and heavy about a new study of mammography, stories with titles like Vast Study Casts Doubts on Value of Mammograms and Do Mammograms Save Lives? ‘Hardly,’ a New Study…
oracknows | February 15, 2014Regular readers know my frustration with the Texas Medical Board. Why is it, I've often wondered, that Stanislaw Burzynski can keep peddling his unproven cancer treatment with seeming impunity for nearly four decades, with every attempt of the TMB over the last four decades seemingly being utterly ineffective? It's not as though Burzynski is alone. There are many other doctors who should, in the opinion of many, have their licenses revoked but keep practicing in Texas. Even when there's a doctor who is clearly an immediate threat to patients, it's hard to get the TMB to do anything. Ditto…
oracknows | February 13, 2014I must confess, I had a rather rough time yesterday. Actually, it's been a rough winter, at least as far as my car is concerned. Record amounts of snow and a January much colder than usual have wreaked havoc on the roads around where I live, producing craters that make our roads and freeways look more like the surface of the moon than anything you'd want to go speeding along on in an automobile. So it was that about a month ago on my way to work I couldn't avoid a particularly nasty crater, and immediately after I hit it I knew something was wrong. My tire pressure light went on, and the car…
oracknows | February 12, 2014The other day, I got to thinking about cults. The reason is that it's been clear to me for some time that the antivaccine movement is a quack cult. In fact, a lot of quack groups are very cultish, the example that reminded me of this having been an excellent report published by a young mother named Megan Sandlin, who used to be antivaccine but is no longer. Her post, Leaving the Antivaccine Movement, reminded me very much of the genre of "deconversion" stories, in which atheists who were once fundamentalist Christians describe the process of their losing their religion or cult members…
oracknows | February 11, 2014I don't know if it's a sign that I've arrived as being a bit more influential than just a blogger or just dumb luck when reporters start sending me things, but I'll take it. It's like blog fodder being served to me on the proverbial silver platter. Unfortunately, as a result of receiving a press release, FDA Denies Treatment to Two Terminally Ill Young Women, from two different sources, after yesterday's hilarious (if I do say so myself) bit of fun with a certain woman who fancies herself a "Thinker" when everything she writes shows that she is anything but, I find myself tackling a much more…
oracknows | February 11, 2014After yesterday's detailed analysis of a study that's being touted far and wide as "evidence" that vitamin C cures cancer, I thought I deserved a bit of a break. No, that doesn't mean I'm going to take the day off from blogging. (Obviously, as you're reading this now.) It does mean that I plan on doing a bit of slumming, though, and what better place to slum than on some of the antivaccine crank blogs? Besides, it's almost as though they want me to apply a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence to their material, given that they've put up posts that provide such ready insight into how…
oracknows | February 9, 2014There are certain things that can happen that are the equivalent of the Bat Signal to me; that is, if you can swallow the idea of me being in any way like Bruce Wayne. Call them the Cancer Signal, if you will. When I see the Cancer Signal, I know that I have to head down to the Cancer Cave—wait a minute, that doesn't sound right. Scratch that. In any caes, there are certain studies or stories that basically demand my attention and say, "Blog me, Orac! Blog me right now!!!" Either that, or they're studies that capture my readers' attention, leading them to e-mail me or Tweet at me plaintive…
oracknows | February 7, 2014If there's one thing that I write that I don't feel I repeat too much (although some might disagree), it's that, unlike other centers and institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), there is not, and never was, a compelling scientific justification for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to exist as a separate entity. There is nothing that NCCAM does that couldn't be done just as well in other parts of the NIH, with the exception of research into modalities with such low prior plausibility and such fantastical proposed mechanisms of working that…
oracknows | February 6, 2014Now we come to a post in which Orac unloads a bit about one of his pet peeves. It is a post that will likely piss a few people off on "his" side. If it does, so be it. He does this now because yesterday something happened that irritated the crap out of me because it put on display one of the less appealing characteristics of the skeptical movement, a tendency to obsessively focus on what it views as important at the expense of losing touch with the big picture. It is a story about knee jerk responses to which we all (myself included) fall prey.
Yesterday it was widely reported in the media,…
oracknows | February 5, 2014Contrary to what you might think, the longer I do this blogging thing, it doesn't necessarily get easier. The reason, of course, is that after more than nine years of near daily posts there are days when it's really hard to come up with something that really gets me fired up to do the hard work it takes to write. I'd be lying if I said there weren't days when the thought going through my head goes something like, "Another bit of idiocy by antivaccinationists? How many times have I seen this before." But sometimes, as much as I sometimes think I've seen it all with respect to quackery, there…
oracknows | February 4, 2014I had originally planned on writing about a different topic today, but, as is so often the case in blogging, something came up that caught my attention, much as the errant thought of a squirrel distracts Dug the Dog. Well, actually, I had to go to an evening meeting for work last night and by the time I came home even the Plexiglass box of blinking lights didn't have enough of a charge left to deliver up fresh Insolence. Fortunately, there's some almost fresh Insolence from the other day that can be repurposed, something that seems imperative since one of the targets of today's Insolence is…
oracknows | February 2, 2014Antivaccinationists irritate me, for reasons that should be obvious to regular readers. The reason is that vaccine-preventable diseases can kill. Contrary to the beliefs of many nonvaccinating parents, who downplay these diseases as being not particularly dangerous, they are dangerous. Of these, one of more dangerous vaccine-preventable diseases is pertussis. That's why a story that popped up in my Facebook feed disturbed me so. Unsurprisingly, it's on that other wretched hive of scum and quackery (with respect to vaccines), Mothering.com:
So, my almost ten month old started coughing and…
oracknows | January 29, 2014As I've discussed from time to time, the three most reviled vaccines among the antivaccine movement are the HPV vaccine (Gardasil and Cervarix), the hepatitis B vaccine, and the influenza vaccine. The first two tend to be demonized because of moralistic associations with sexual activity, given that HPV is most commonly spread by sexual activity and hepatitis is similarly often spread through bodily fluids exchanged during sex. This leads to what I've referred to as "slut-shaming" the HPV vaccine, given that it is recommended to be given before girls become sexually active by inferring (and…
oracknows | January 24, 2014After a digression yesterday, it's time to get back to business. Don't get me wrong. Yesterday's post was business. It was definitely something important (to me) that needed to be said, in my not-so-humble pseudonymous opinion. It just wasn't the usual business I engage in on this blog.
I've often referred to what I (and others) refer to as the "arrogance of ignorance." This particular not-so-desirable trait consists basically of people without any special training in a field or who are otherwise unqualified in a field coming to believe that they understand the field better than experts who…
dr. dolittle | January 23, 2014I am very excited to report that the Puerto Rico Physiological Society will be hosting their 4th annual meeting, "Exercise Physiology: From Molecules to Systems" on February 8th.
PRPS 2014 Save the Date
Last year's meeting was focused on mitochondria and was a big success. This year's meeting is shaping up to be similarly successful.
oracknows | January 22, 2014And now for something completely different.
There was a time when, as a blogger, I would have been instantly aware of an incident like the one I'm about to discuss, instantly aware of it and all over it within a day. That it's been a few days since this happened, and I remained blissfully unaware of it until yesterday tells me how much I've changed as a blogger since my early days. Sure, some things haven't changed much, as anyone who reads my first post cum manifesto can see if he goes back and reads it, such as the subject matter of this blog and my commitment to science and science-based…
oracknows | January 22, 2014I realize that I just wrote about infamous cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski yesterday. (Note how I refuse to call him an "oncologist," mainly because he isn't one, having never completed an oncology fellowship—or even an internal medicine residency, the usual prerequisite to do an oncology fellowship.) However, there's a bit more that I wanted to touch on before moving on to other topics. What brought this on was a Google Alert that appeared in my in box yesterday relevant to yesterday's post. You might recall that yesterday I mentioned a campaign by the Alliance for Natural Health USA (ANH-…
oracknows | January 20, 2014The year 2013 finished with serious setbacks for Stanislaw Burzynski and his unproven cancer treatment that he dubbed "antineoplastons" (ANPs) way back in the early 1970s. As you might recall, in November, two things happened. First, the FDA released its initial reports on its inspection of the Burzynski Clinic and Burzynski Research Institute (BRI) carried out from January to March 2013. They were damning in the extreme, pointing out the shoddy operating methods of the institutional review board (IRB) used by the BRI to approve and oversee Burzynski's "clinical trials" (and I use the term…
oracknows | January 19, 2014The flu season continues apace around my part of the country. I wrote about it about a week and a half ago, in particular how people don't get their flu shots because they don't think they need them, because they don't think the flu is a serious disease. Two more stories illustrate this disconnect. For instance, here's a story about three people in their 20s who died of the flu in Michigan. The key heart-wrenching passage is this:
Ashley McCormick was 23 years old when she died December 27.
"We were like, 'This is the flu. How can this happen? It's just the flu.' I mean, everybody gets the…
oracknows | January 16, 2014Practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) have a love-hate relationship with randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Actually, it's mostly hate, but they do crave the validation that only randomized clinical trials can provide within the paradigm of evidence-based medicine (EBM). Yes, I intentionally said EBM, rather than science-based medicine (SBM), because, as I've described so many times before, the two are not the same thing. EBM fetishizes clinical trials, a fixation that I sometimes call "methodolatry," defined by a blog bud of mine from long ago as the "profane…