quackery
oracknows | January 5, 2017If there's one thing that proponents of "integrative medicine" (or, as it's been called in the past, "complementary and alternative medicine," or CAM) take great pains to emphasize whenever defending their integration of prescientific and pseudoscientific medicine into medicine, it's that they do not recommend using "alternative medicine" instead of real medicine but in addition to real medicine. Indeed, even the "gods" of integrative medicine, such as Barrie Cassileth at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, not only emphasize that but actually often take umbrage when it is suggested that…
oracknows | December 30, 2016This will almost certainly be my last post of 2016. Unless something so amazing, terrible, or just plain interesting to me happens between now and tomorrow night, I probably won't be posting again until January 2 or 3. Many bloggers like to do "end of year roundup"-type posts that list their best or most popular post, trends noted in 2016 relevant to their area of blogging interest, or predictions for the coming year as their last post of the year, but that's never really been my style. I don't remember the last time I did a post like that, and I'm too lazy today to bother to go and look it…
oracknows | December 26, 2016With the Christmas holiday over, I thought it would be a good time to revisit a topic that I've discussed before from time to time over the last several years. Part of the reason is that I saw something that irritated me before the holidays. Another part of the reason is that Christmas was so busy that some of you might recognize parts of this post. Fear not, more original Insolence will be forthcoming, likely tomorrow.
In any event, given that I’m not a fan of naturopathy, it probably comes as no surprise to our readers that I’m even less of a fan of the emerging “specialty” of naturopathic…
oracknows | December 20, 2016One of the oldest antivaccine tropes that first encountered is one that I like to call the “toxins gambit.” Basically, this is an antivaccine lie that portrays vaccines as being laden with all manner of “toxins” because they have—gasp!—chemicals with scary sounding names and even some chemicals that are toxic. The lie derives from the the famous adage that the “dose makes the poison.” For instance, it’s well known that there are traces of formaldehyde in some vaccines left over from the production process. Sounds scary, right? Certainly our old buddy the antivaccine-sympathetic pediatrician…
oracknows | December 19, 2016Blogging is a funny thing. Sometimes the coincidence involved is epic. For instance, as I do on many Mondays, yesterday I crossposted a modified and updated version of a post from a week ago from my not-so-super-secret other blog. This time around, it just so happened to be a post about what I like to refer to as the placebo narrative. As is my wont, I described in the usual ridiculous level of detail why that narrative is so popular among promoters of pseudoscientific medical treatments and, more importantly, why that narrative is approaches black hole density bullshit. It’s something that…
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 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 6, 2016If there’s one thing about the reporting of the 2016 election that irritated me, it was the massive underreporting of certain antiscience views held by the man who is now our President-Elect. Sure, there was coverage about his denial of anthropogenic climate change from time to time. Much less reported was his long history of antivaccine views, a history I’ve been documenting since 2007. I started documenting it again in September 2015, just before the first Republican Presidential Debate. Then, the vaccine issue came up during that debate, and the mainstream media took notice—briefly.…
oracknows | December 4, 2016I’ve frequently written about a form of medicine often practiced by those who bill themselves as practicing “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine” (or, as I like to refer to it, “integrating” quackery with medicine). I’m referring to something called “functional medicine” or, sometimes, “functional wellness.” Over the years, I’ve tried to explain why the term “functional medicine” (FM) is really a misnomer, how in reality it is a form of “personalized medicine” gone haywire, or, as I like to refer to it, as “making it up as you go along.” Unfortunately,…
oracknows | November 30, 2016A week and a half ago, a conference was held at the NYU Langone Medical Center, Confronting Vaccine Resistance: Strategies for Success. It featured speakers and panelists whom I admire quite a bit, including Paul Offit, the man who is to antivaccine loons Satan, Darth Vader, Voldemort, and Sauron all rolled up into one. Also featured were Richard Pan, the California state senator who co-sponsored SB 277, which passed and is now a law that bans nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates; bioethicist Arthur Caplan, a strong advocate for vaccines; Dorit Reiss, a law school professor and…
oracknows | November 29, 2016I’m always hesitant to write about matters that are more political than scientific or medical, although sometimes the sorts of topics that I blog about inevitably require it (e.g., the 21st Century Cures Act, an act that buys into the myth that to bring "cures" to patients faster we have to neuter the FDA and a retooled version of which is still being considered). This is one of those times. Yesterday, I woke up to the news that President-Elect Donald Trump had chosen Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) as his new Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS),…
oracknows | November 15, 2016Whenever I write about homeopathy, I almost always refer to it at least once as “The One Quackery To Rule Them All.” It’s a phrase I’ve used to describe homeopathy for several years now, and for good reason. Of all the quackery out there, with the possible exception of reiki, homeopathy is the one that is most obviously quackery. Its two main “Laws” are so clearly pseudoscience that you’d think it incredibly unlikely that anyone would fall for such nonsense, but fall for it they do.
I’ll briefly show you what I mean. That I can do so this briefly should show those unfamiliar with homeopathy…
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 9, 2016Yesterday, I wrote about alternative medicine clinics in Germany that offer a combination of alternative cancer cures plus experimental therapeutics administered improperly outside the auspices of a clinical trial. In particular, I discussed two cases. The first was British actress Leah Bracknell, who is raising money to go to one of these alternative cancer clinics to treat her stage IV lung cancer. the second was a British woman named Pauline Gahan, who was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer and has thus far spent £300,000 for a combination of vitamin infusions, “detox,” and Keytruda…
oracknows | November 3, 2016Way, way back in the day, before I took an interest in pseudoscientific medical claims, I knew who Deepak Chopra was. Back then, though, like most doctors, I didn’t pay much attention to him and didn’t know much about him other than that he was some sort of alternative medicine guru, a physician who had embraced Ayurvedic medicine and blathered about “quantum” consciousness. It didn’t take long once I embraced skepticism to run face-first into the utter woo that s Deepak Chopra’s message, in part thanks to other skeptical bloggers introducing me to his woo. Indeed, back in the early days of…
oracknows | October 31, 2016It’s time to get this video clip out again:
Yes, just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. But who are “they”? I’m referring to the cult that thinks that bleach enemas (and also ingested bleach) will cure children of autism. I was reminded of that cult when ABC News 20/20 aired a special on Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), the aforementioned bleach miracle cure. It’s the sort of story that we need to see more of, the result of what was reported to be a year-long investigation of Rev. Jim Humble and his church, the inventor and primary promoter of MMS as a cure for autism and just…
oracknows | October 25, 2016Here we go again.
Naturopaths crave legitimacy for their brand of pseudoscientific medicine. Basically, they delude themselves into thinking that they are real doctors and can function as primary care providers, despite abundant evidence that they cannot. they One (of several) ways they seek to acquire that legitimacy for naturopathy and themselves is through promoting the passage of laws in states licensing them as health care providers, as they have been repeatedly doing (and, fortunately, thus far failing to achieve) in my home state of Michigan and continuing to attempt in Massachusetts…
oracknows | October 23, 2016A little over a month ago, I wrote about how proponents of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), now more frequently called "integrative medicine," go to great lengths to claim nonpharmacological treatments for, well, just about anything as somehow being CAM or "integrative." The example I used was a systematic review article published by several of the bigwigs at that government font of pseudoscience, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) about CAM approaches for the management of chronic pain. You can read my whole post for yourself if you want the…
oracknows | October 19, 2016Eight months ago, I asked the question: Did chiropractic manipulation of her neck cause Katie May’s stroke? Now, it appears, I know the answer, and the answer is yes:
Katie May, a model who posed for Playboy and gained a massive following on Snapchat, suffered a “catastrophic” stroke in early February and later died after being taken off life-support. Now, TMZ reports reports that a visit to the chiropractor left her with an injury that precipitated the stroke.
TMZ obtained May’s death certificate, which says that she suffered a blunt force injury during a “neck manipulation by [a]…
oracknows | October 19, 2016It’s been a while since I wrote about Stanislaw Burzynski, the Polish ex-pat physician who is not an oncologist but treats cancer patients in his Houston clinic with a mixture of a compound he calls “antineoplastons” (ANPs) and “gene-targeted” therapy. The former are really a mixture of various chemicals he isolated from the blood and urine back in the 1970s, including chemicals like phenylacetic acid (PA) and phenylacetyl glutamine (PAG), that he thought to be endogenous cancer suppressors but has never been able to demonstrate that they are, despite having had four decades to do so.…