Popular Culture
oracknows | March 6, 2017I've been blogging fairly regularly about Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski since 2011, and now the story is over...sort of. Unfortunately, as you will see, the ending is far from ideal. It is, however, somewhat better than I had feared it might be. What I'm referring to, of course, is the final ruling of the Texas Medical Board regarding Dr. Burzynski, the Houston cancer doctor who has been a frequent topic of this blog because of his practices of charging desperate cancer patient tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars for his "antineoplastons" (ANPs) and, later, what he…
oracknows | March 2, 2017I've never been a huge fan of the We The People (WTP) website, which was set up during the Obama administration to allow people to petition the White House and, if they receive a sufficient number of signatures on their petition, receive an official response from the White House. While I applauded the sentiment of wanting to provide people an online means of petitioning the administration and like that a petition receiving 100,000 signatures in 30 days would receive a response, I was disappointed by the results. For one thing, although 321 of the 323 petitions that reached the threshold have…
oracknows | February 21, 2017Back in December, I took note of the vaccine situation in Texas. First, I pointed out how a new article by Peter Hotez, MD, a pediatrician at Baylor University, had sounded the alarm that the number of schoolchildren with nonmedical exemptions to the Texas school vaccine mandate had skyrocketed by 19-fold over the last 13 or 14 years. As if that weren't alarming enough, I discussed the resident antivaccine groups in Texas, who had become quite active. I thought that that was probably all I would write about Texas for a while. Silly me. Texas is fast turning into a series of its own, much as I…
oracknows | February 19, 2017]As hard as it is to believe, I've been dealing with the antivaccine movement since at least the early 2000s. Back then, I didn't have a blog, either this one or my not-so-super-secret other blog, and most of my online activities were restricted to Usenet. For those of you who don't remember Usenet, which has largely become the province of trolls and spam these days, it is a massive set of online discussion boards on literally thousands of topics. Indeed, I first encountered antivaccine advocates on Usenet and started to learn the sorts of pseudoscientific arguments they make, so that when I…
oracknows | January 23, 2017[Note: The proprietor of the website has responded by e-mail. See Comment #37.]
Now that the unreal has become real, I was just thinking how weird it is that I've never actually blogged about a phenomenon that directly contributed to the election of Donald Trump. I'm referring to the phenomenon known now as "fake news." Now, by "fake news," I do not mean sloppy reporting. I do not mean biased reporting. I do not even mean a type of article that many crank websites publish in which a real news story (often with other news stories) is used as jumping-off point for pseudoscience and conspiracy…
oracknows | January 19, 2017So I was distracted yesterday from what I had intended to write about by an irresistible target provided me courtesy of Toby Cosgrove, MD, CEO of The Cleveland Clinic, who bemoaned all those nasty pro-science advocates who had had the temerity to link the antivaccine rant by the director of the Clinic's Wellness Institute to the quackery practiced there of whose affinity for antivaccine quackery Cosgrove appears to be oblivious. So I took care of that target, and now I'm back to the topic I had wanted to apply some Insolence to. Yes, there was no way I was going to allow this pseudoscientific…
oracknows | January 10, 2017I remember when I first heard on Twitter yesterday afternoon that our President-Elect, Donald Trump, was going to meet with longtime antivaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Remembering how Trump had met with antivaccine "hero" Andrew Wakefield before the election and how after the election antivaccine activists were practically salivating over the thought of what Trump might do with respect to the CDC and vaccines, I was reminded of just how much I fear for medical science policy under the Trump administration. I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. For a moment, I actually…
oracknows | January 9, 2017The fallout from the social media firestorm from the antivaccine rant written by the Medical Director of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute and published by Cleveland.com last Friday has abated but far from faded away. The offending physician, Dr. Daniel Neides, was forced to issue an apology, which was one of the least convincing apologies I've ever seen, and The Cleveland Clinic issued a statement announcing its commitment to vaccines and that Dr. Niedes would suffer some as yet undetermined "disciplinary action." Reactions outside of The Cleveland Clinic ranged from the suitably…
oracknows | January 8, 2017Over the weekend, a most unusual social media firestorm erupted in response to a blog post by Daniel Neides, MD, MBA, Acting Medical Director of the Tanya I. Edwards Center for Integrative Medicine, Vice Chair and Chief Operating Officer of Cleveland Clinic Wellness, as well as the Associate Director of Clinical Education for The Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine (CCLCM), where he oversees all clinical activities during years three through five of the medical school. The reason for the social media uproar was that Dr Neides' post, entitled Make 2017 the year to avoid toxins (good…
oracknows | December 28, 2016Quackademic medicine. I didn't invent the term. (Dr. R. W. Donnell did—nearly nine years ago.) However, I sure use it a lot, because it perfectly describes a phenomenon that has proliferated and metastasized throughout the body of academic medicine like the cancer it is. I like to think that, in my own way, I've popularized the word to describe this particular phenomenon. But what it this phenomenon? It is nothing less than the degradation of the scientific basis of medicine through the infiltration of pseudoscience and quackery into medical academia, with academic physicians who otherwise…
oracknows | December 23, 2016As hard as it is to believe, I've been at this blogging thing for 12 years now. In fact, it's been so long that this year I didn't even remember to mention it when it happened nearly two weeks ago. Over that time period, I've dealt with a large number of conspiracy theories. Indeed, skeptics can't help but avoid it. After all, conspiracy theories are at the heart of a lot of pseudoscience, quackery, and crankery. For instance, the very first bit of pseudohistory that served as my "gateway drug" into skepticism, Holocaust denial, is based upon a massive conspiracy theory that the Jews made up…
oracknows | December 21, 2016Three weeks ago, I wrote a post that, much to my surprise, went viral, garnering more Facebook "Likes" than any before it, although it only came in maybe third in traffic after the all-time record-holding post from a couple of years ago. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. It was, after all, about Tom Price, Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). What I noted that apparently caught the attention of many times more people than my usual daily brain droppings usually do was that Tom Price belongs to one of the wingnuttiest of wingnut medical…
oracknows | December 16, 2016There are times when I wonder: How on earth did I miss this?
Usually, I pride myself on being pretty timely in my blogging, writing about new stuff that’s fairly fresh. Sure, barring a fortuitous confluence of events and timing, I’m rarely the “firstest with the mostest” on a topic. I do, after all, have a demanding day job and generally don’t mix blogging with my work if I can avoid it (although cranks seem to want to make that impossible with their latest tactic of infiltrating my cancer center’s Facebook page to post rants about how evil I am). There’s no way I can compete with bloggers…
oracknows | December 13, 2016I’ve seen it noted that our new President-Elect seems to be selecting his cabinet officers and directors of federal bureaucracies based on how much they oppose the mission of the department they are supposed to head. For instance, to head the Department of Health and Human Services, he picked an orthopedic surgeon who belongs to an organization utterly opposed to any role of the federal government in health care and who himself looks poised to dismantle as much of the Affordable Care Act as he can. For the Department of Energy, he picked Rick Perry, a man so dumb that when he was asked during…
oracknows | December 12, 2016I wasn’t always a skeptic. Maybe I should rephrase that. I’ve probably always been a skeptic since a young age. It’s just that I didn’t start self-identifying as one until around 1998 or so. Oddly enough, my “gateway drug” into more organized skepticism was refuting Holocaust denial. I’ve told the tale on multiple occasions before, the first time on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (nearly 12 years ago now), about how I first discovered Holocaust denial. I always encourage new readers to read the whole thing, but the CliffsNotes version is I encountered the…
oracknows | December 11, 2016Old fart that I am, I’ve been a fan of The Rolling Stones since the mid-1970s, when I was in junior high school. Over the years, I’ve accumulated pretty close to all of their studio albums—and even bought multiple remastered versions of classics like Exile on Main Street and Beggar’s Banquet—and got access to the rest when I discovered the joy of streaming through Apple Music. Granted, the Stones went through a rough patch, creatively speaking, in the 1980s (the less said about Under Cover and Dirty Work, for instance, the better) and nothing they’ve done since the late 1970s has lived up to…
oracknows | December 8, 2016Yesterday, I noted the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, a Hobson’s choice of a bill for those of us who support increased biomedical research funding that basically said: You can have an increase in the NIH budget. You can have the Cancer Moonshot. You can have President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative and his brain mapping initiative. You can have additional funding to combat the opioid crisis. You can have all that, but only if you also accept a grab bag of longstanding pharmaceutical industry wishes, such as new pathways to approve drugs and devices with a lower standard of…
oracknows | November 13, 2016John Weeks has long been an activist for alternative medicine—excuse me, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, as it’s more commonly referred to these days, “integrative medicine.” Despite his having zero background in scientific research or the design and execution of experiments and clinical trials, for some bizarre reason in May he was appointed editor of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (JACM). It didn’t take him long at all to use his new post to launch a nasty broadside against CAM critics in general (such as yours truly) and those who criticized a…
oracknows | November 10, 2016Well, I’m back.
Yes, late last night, I re-entered returned home from vacation in Mexico before our new President-Elect has a chance to build his wall. I was so exhausted that I had no time to write anything and remain so. At least I wasn’t stupid enough to go back to work today and instead took the whole week off. Like most of you, I’m still processing he cluster—oh, wait, no major profanity here—that was the US election, whose results definitely put a damper on the trip home.
In particular, I fear for what the new administration will do to science in this country, and might write about that…
oracknows | October 26, 2016Although I did not coin it, I frequently use the term “quackademic medicine” because, unfortunately, there’s a lot of quackademic medicine around. Although regular readers know what the term means, i always feel obligated to briefly explain what quackademic medicine is, for the benefit of any newbie who might happen upon this blog. Basically, it is a term used to describe an increasingly common and alarming phenomenon, the infiltration of rank quackery and pseudoscience into medical academia. You might think it impossible or unbelievable, but it’s anything but. Beginning around a quarter of a…