Popular Culture
oracknows | September 22, 2017Back in the day I used to do a weekly feature every Friday that I used to call Your Friday Dose of Woo. For purposes of the bit, woo consisted of particularly ridiculous or silly bits of pseudoscience, quackery, or mysticism, such as the Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface. Amazingly, I managed to keep that up for a couple of years, but over time I started sensing that I was getting a bit too repetitive. The same bits of pseudoscience kept recurring. Over time I had to dig more and more to find suitable bits of woo that amused me enough to inspire me to ever more over-the-top heights of…
oracknows | September 8, 2017As a medical blogger with a skeptical bent and a rather aggressive proclivity towards defending science-based medicine, I generally like STAT News. Sure, it's occasionally screwed up royally (e.g., its credulous false balance reporting on a patient of cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski named Neil Fachon), but in general it's usually a good source of medical news and analysis. No publication is perfect, of course, but STATNews is generally better than average, and I appreciate that.
That's why I was disappointed to see how thoroughly a pharma-backed astroturf group whose mission is to loosen…
oracknows | August 30, 2017Yesterday I discussed a highly unethical clinical trial of a new herpes vaccine, based on what appears to be questionable science but backed by über-Libertarian Peter Thiel. The reason the trial is so unethical is because Rational Vaccines, the company that developed the herpes vaccine and is conducting the clinical trial, not only arranged to carry it out offshore but, unlike all American companies carrying out clinical trials offshore for purposes of gathering data to support an application for FDA approval, Rational Vaccines apparently carried the trial out without any oversight by an…
oracknows | August 8, 2017Yesterday was a busy day for a number of reasons. I thought of skipping it, but I couldn't resist taking notice of one particularly hilarious bit that I found on what is perhaps the wretchedest of all the wretched hives of scum and quackery on the Internet, NaturalNews.com. There, yesterday, on a very special day for me, I saw this headline by Mike Adams: Facebook blocks all Natural News article posts to 2.2M fans after site posts White House petition citing immunization dangers:
In the latest outrageous example of total censorship against the independent media, Facebook has blocked nearly…
oracknows | August 2, 2017I wasn't sure if I should do this post, mainly because I could find so little information to elaborate on a bit of information that I discovered. Then I thought about it a bit more. Perhaps my not being able to find out will illustrate my point better than a detailed progress report on a woman whom I blogged about once nearly 16 months ago. Also, it's a hopeful story. At least I think it is, because it looks as though the young woman at the center of it has abandoned quackery.
Basically, this was the story of a young woman with a bad cancer who had eschewed conventional therapy, particularly…
oracknows | June 23, 2017Long time readers (and I do mean really long time readers) know that I used to do a regular Friday feature called Your Friday Dose of Woo. In the feature, I used to look for the silliest, woo-iest bits of quackery and pseudoscience that I could find, like quantum homeopathy, SCIO, Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface, or Magickal psychic amplification a-go-go. Over time, it got harder and harder to do that on a weekly basis, but I still think that, barring some new, deep, serious story, there's value to ending the week with something on a lighter note. Yes, I know, this is a rule or…
oracknows | June 21, 2017Courtrooms are generally not a good place to decide issues of science. I've said this more times than I can remember. Admittedly, courts can at times do pretty well with issues of science. The Vaccine Court is a good example, as is the Autism Omnibus decision, which ruled that the test cases brought before the Vaccine Court to determine if there was a plausible case to show a potential causative relationship between vaccines and autism. The court ruled against the test case complainants, even though the rules of evidence are those of a civil court, in which "50% and a feather" are all that is…
oracknows | June 2, 2017I've discussed several times over the last several years my impression that the media have become in general less tolerant of antivaccine views. At least, the media seem less willing to indulge in "tell both sides" false equivalence. Back when I started blogging, I routinely used to bemoan how news stories about vaccines or autism would almost inevitably include obligatory quotes from antivaxer like J.B. Handley, Jenny McCarthy, and sometimes even Andrew Wakefield. More recently, over the last five years or so, such tropes seem a lot less common. I don't have any solid evidence to back up my…
oracknows | May 17, 2017After yesterday's post about how antivaxers were utterly losing their mind about an ill-chosen idiom that appeared in a Boston Herald editorial last week. In it, the editor concluded by saying that how antivaxers have been preying on the Somali immigrant population in Minnesota, feeding them antivaccine misinformation that has resulted in two measles outbreaks, one in 2011 and one this year, which is up to 58 victims, a number that continues to climb, should be a "hanging offense." In my post, I emphasized the hypocrisy and disingenuousness of the response of antivaxers, who took an offhand…
oracknows | May 12, 2017Normally, I like to mix up my topics, but it's been one of those weeks where basically discussing the antivaccine movement has taken over. Sometimes when that happens, I just go with the flow. Besides, there really is one more story involving that antivaccine movement that I want to comment on. Remember last week, when the story of how the antivaccine movement had targeted Somali immigrants in Minnesota, with a resultant plunge in MMR uptake among that population over the last decade. Completely unsurprisingly, given that MMR uptake among the Somalis fell from 92% to 42% in over a decade,…
oracknows | May 3, 2017[Editor's note: Sorry this is a few hours late. I forgot to change the status from DRAFT to SCHEDULE in WordPress last night. D'oh!]
The single most persuasive strategies by which quacks sell their wares and believers in quackery persuade others to try the quackery they believe in is the personal anecdote. Indeed, I established very early on in the history of this blog a type of post that has become a staple that shows up several times a year. In these posts, I deconstruct "alternative cancer cure" testimonials, showing how the story as related doesn't provide convincing evidence that the…
oracknows | April 30, 2017There are many harms attributable to the antivaccine movement and its promotion of antivaccine beliefs. Certainly, the harm those of us who have been combatting antivaccine misinformation fear is the return of vaccine-preventable diseases, which is something we've seen in the form of outbreaks, such as the Disneyland measles outbreak two years ago and, in my own state, pertussis outbreaks. The Disneyland outbreak was a wake-up call to California legislators, who in its wake passed SB 277, a law that eliminated personal belief exemptions (PBEs) to school vaccine requirements. Now, only medical…
The failure of the Texas Medical Board: Houston cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski is back in business
oracknows | April 26, 2017When last I wrote about Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski nearly two months ago, he had, as I characterized it, just mostly slithered away from justice once again. The Texas Medical Board had not removed his license and had only fined him relatively lightly given his offenses. True, he had conditions placed on his continued practice (more on that later), but it hasn't slowed him down, as you will soon see. Another family is raising funds, this time from the UK, to travel to Houston for his nostrums. Basically, by failing to revoke Stanislaw Burzynski's medical license, the Texas…
oracknows | April 7, 2017One of the most common topics of this blog is the alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial. Basically, these testimonials consist of a cancer patient telling a story of how alternative medicine saved him or her from cancer. They tend to consist of two varieties. The first variety is the patient who underwent a partial course of conventional therapy. In the case of breast cancer, most commonly the woman has undergone surgery but no chemotherapy, hormonal therapy, or radiation therapy, deciding to undertake quack treatments after surgery. Inevitably, the person doing the testimonial credits…
oracknows | April 6, 2017It's a strange world after all, and I'll show you why.
Last night, as I deposited myself on my couch with my laptop sitting on my lap, there to churn out yet another installment of the insolence most of you love and a few of you love to hate read, I had a Dug the Dog moment. The squirrel in this case was Twitter. Normally, although I do have a Twitter feed, my enthusiasm for it very much waxes and wanes. Although I do regularly post stuff, I can sometimes go days without contributing an original Tweet, leaving my feed fallow, with only automatic Tweets based on RSS feeds of my blogs as the…
oracknows | April 4, 2017If there's one thing about living in Michigan that is truly irritating, it is that the legislature is currently controlled by a bunch of right wing Tea Party-style Republicans, while the governor is Rick Snyder, someone who sold himself as "one tough nerd" and a reasonable centrist businessman but who's consistently refused to stand up to the worst elements in his party. Oh, and he was also asleep at the switch, contributing to the Flint water crisis. Add to that my state senator, Patrick Colbeck, who not only has antivaccine proclivities, but "questions" evolution and, of course, denies…
oracknows | April 4, 2017Last week, I took note of something that antivaxers hadn't done in nine years, specifically a "march on Washington." Back in 2008, Jenny McCarthy and her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey led a rag tag rogues' gallery of antivaccine activists on a march and rally that they called "Green Our Vaccines." The name of the rally, of course, derived from a common trope beloved of antivaccine activists that I like to refer to as the "toxin gambit." It's basically a Food Babe-like fear of those "evil chemicals" writ large in a claim that vaccines are packed full of horrific chemicals that are Making Our…
oracknows | March 17, 2017Among quacks, epigenetics is the new quantum theory.
I know I've said that before, but it's worth saying again in response to a new quack I've just discovered, courtesy of an article in The Daily Mail Fail by one Dr. Sara Gottfried pimping her books and health empire, From taking a sauna to drinking pinot noir, a fascinating book by a hormone doctor reveals how to... switch off your bad genes and live longer.
Epigenetics. She's talking about epigenetics. Of course, she keeps using that word. I do not think it means what she thinks it means. Indeed, if what's in this article is a taste of what…
oracknows | March 8, 2017I've been writing about a phenomenon that I like to refer to as "quackademic medicine," defined as the infiltration into academic medical centers and medical school of unscientific and pseudoscientific treatment modalities that are unproven or disproven. I didn't coin the term. To the best of my knowledge, Dr. Robert W. Donnell did nine years ago. However, I adopted it with a vengeance, so much so that a lot of people think I coined the term. In any case, I first began sounding the alarm about the infiltration of quackery like acupuncture, "energy medicine," naturopathy, homeopathy,…
oracknows | March 7, 2017Massive is the misinformation promulgated by the antivaccine movement, and many are its lies. For example, antivaxers claim that, in some way or other, vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), cancer, and a wide variety of other conditions and diseases when there is no credible evidence that they do and lots of evidence that they don’t. One of the favorite tropes used by antivaxers to frighten parents out of vaccinating their children is known as the "toxins" gambit, in which antivaxers cite lists of scary-sounding ingredients in vaccines like…